Where did all the public bathrooms go? | Hacker News Reader

Where did all the public bathrooms go?

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349 pointsherbertl829 comments

This really hits home. As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU. I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there, and you can easily ask any place to use their toilet - there's no stigma. I even had to run into a police station in rural China once. They were 100% chill about it, though they had to unlock a gate for me.

Xi Jinping really will be remembered as the Toilet King, he did issue a few decrees early on, and now in every Tier-88 rural Chinese village road you can find a modern toilet (yes, squat), clean, with water. Paper is hit and miss still though. Cross to Hong Kong and it's the same, but paper is reliable. Hong Kong is definitely richer.

Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok, that's an absolutely next level experience, clean, smells good, relaxing music. Mmm...

And EU is a freaking horror show. In many public toilets there's a used syringe compartment as well. Truly a 5-star service.

What's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes. And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash, similar to how cigarette disposals are mandatory in typical airplanes.

> What's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes.

Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed...

> And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash

The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground. As is typical, the intentions are noble, but what ends up happening is people who can't even be bothered to not shoot up their gutter heroin in public are given society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.

oook, so if according to your message, the disposals are mostly used by diabetics, then again, what's wrong with them?

They weren't saying there is anything wrong with the syringe disposal per se, but instead that it's indicative of the people who use those facilities and the priorities of the authorities that manage them.

It is observed that you have junkies shooting up in bathrooms, evidenced by needles strewn on the ground. So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.

> So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.

Given the cost vs the benefits, why not? A box mounted to a wall is a pittance.

Feel free to elaborate your plan for the junkies that would be cost effective, practical and ethical.

I looked into this a while back (~6 years ago) and it basically broke down like this: diabetics outnumber injectable drug users two to one but not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home. Drug users, however, have less compunction about sticking themselves in a public space, particular the homeless. Best guess based on these numbers is that it's a 50-50 split between these populations as to who's using public sharps containers.

> society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.

This argument could be made about providing drugs themselves but fails under the faintest scrutiny for sharps containers because said containers have wide uses beyond shooting up heroin.

Homeless heroin addicts who inject themselves in public are not uniformly distributed. Thus while in some places you would expect some such injectable drug use in a public toilet (though I doubt most would bother to go find a toilet for that anyway), that is unlikely for the majority of toilets in a country that contain syringe disposers. On the other hand, one would expect that diabetics who inject insulin would be closer to be uniformly distributed (conditional to the population distribution).

If one could find syringe disposers only in areas where public heroin use commonly takes place that would be believable, but it is not the case.

In contrast, there are actual, real programs and places in many countries to manage issues arising with syringe use, trying to reduce syringe sharing to reduce blood-transmissible diseases etc.

> not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home.

I'd love to hear the citation for this one, as people using injectable insulin generally need to do in conjunction with eating, and I can't think of where you'd get the idea that T1 diabetics who use injectable insulin avoid eating outside the home as a general rule.

Granted, nowadays plenty of people are using insulin pumps which decimates disposable syringe use, but I'm really puzzled where you picked up that in-home/away-from-home impression from.

I think they're referring to type 2 diabetics who might just be on a long lasting insulin and not need to inject at every meal?

Novopens have existed for a long, long time (40 years). Syringe disposal units are not for the diabetics and they never were. Where I live, they are commonly found in public toilets with awful yellowish lights that make it really difficult to see blood vessels.

Sure they were! They're key safety infrastructure in response to a universal problem to keep needles out of the trash. People being harmed by needle stick injuries don't care if the needles are being improperly disposed of due to illegal drug use, or legal injections.

Where I live, needle disposal boxes are available in almost all institutional restrooms. I'm not sure why you think the yellow light is relevant.

Here's a history of the problem in San Francisco. My memories of the issue in Washington/Oregon around the same time are similar:

https://www.japha.org/article/S1086-5802(15)30128-5/abstract

Another article, again highlighting that the focus on needle disposal is keeping all needles out of the trash, as a broader occupational safety issue:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014572179402000...

Anyone with type 1 diabetes is injecting while outside the home. Usually it's a long acting baseline insulin that you can inject at home and then a faster acting one that you inject before eating or drinking anything that's not water.

> Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed...

What motivates this infrastructure is the danger to workers if syringes are just thrown into the trash.

My dad had type one diabetes with a type A personality, and was very particular about making sure that syringes were disposed of properly. Not everyone is this careful, and they put others at risk.

> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground

But it's better if at least some of them are in the trash and not scattered around, isn't it? I may be wrong but it seems to me that public opinion doesn't matter to these people anyway, so there's no point in getting rid of such garbage bins

Nobody's choosing to use heroin because it's slightly easier to not litter needles. The tiny harm reduction measure is good.

> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground.

Yeah, well, that's your culture and a direct end result of how people are treated and made to feel part of or outside of it.

In Australia there are diabetics and drug addicts as much as anywhere, but rarely problems with sharps on the ground or littering in general- go figure <shrug>.

Drug use: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-15/australian-drug-use-w...

  Australians have consumed 22.2 tonnes of methylamphetamine (meth), cocaine, heroin and MDMA in a year, according to the latest wastewater survey.

That's about a gram each over the year, or rather many people don't use, a few use a lot.

Diabetics, sharp disposal: https://www.diabetesaustralia.com.au/resources/safe-sharps/

Drug users, sharps: https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/U_Z/Where-to-find-n...

At the suburban council level: https://cosp.t1cloud.com/apps/KnowledgeBase/mySouthPerth/art...

Some measures that mitigate a problem are associated with places where said problem is a frequent occurrence.

If a place has tornado drills and tornado shelters, it's a safe bet that tornados are at least somewhat likely.

Some safety and security measures have the effect of making a place feel unsafe and insecure, for this reason.

Diabetics use short needle subcutaneous syringes that can be recapped and disposed of later. They have to have their insulin stored somewhere, which is just as suitable for a used syringe.

I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. Not the worst thing in the world, but I do find it frustrating often to not have a bathroom available nearby (small bladder)

But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound

Yet another consequence of no longer living in a high-trust society.

What I want to know is if anyone can identify when exactly the homeless issue became so bad. It was already a problem when I lived in the Bay, and when I moved back to the East Coast it had been 10 years in the making (conveniently when I was away). Clearly there a some sharp lines that can be drawn somewhere. But it's hard to get some actual answers.

Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.

California is a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see.. but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got that do(ough)-re-mi.

https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm

When it became unfashionable to put mentally ill people in asylums. The additional fashion of "giving local people a voice" in construction projects planning did not help either.

The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?

Yet strangely, we imprison people based on their intent all the time.

For years a woman ran around in traffic and was killed by a car to protect her from the state. Nothing could be done? She had to die?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ca...

Ideally we would have a way for people who can't take care of themselves, or hold a job to be taken care of that isn't effectively putting them in prison.

Mental "asylums" that were almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than prisons is clearly bad. But just leaving people to live on the streets or end up in actual prisons isn't strictly better.

I'm not saying we should bring back the asylums, at least the way they were, but there should be a better way to take care of people who aren't able to care for themselves.

Bring them back! Yes they were bad and got abused, but not doing them is worse. Bring them back, spend so much money on them that the abuses of the system are monitored tracked reported and fixed and then fire the people who abuse the system. That takes political capital and will that doesn't exist, but the Overton window isn't going to move in its own.

Exactly and once you're in the asylum the doctors can lobotomize and drug you to the point of insanity. People used to abuse the system to get rid of family members they had an inheritance dispute with.

Also queer kids who refused to pretend to be a good little cishet

Well, historically we did this by hand waving away all that and just letting some evil system take care of it out of sight out of mind, who cares how the sausage is made if you never see the factory.

That's not really an option now since the last people to blindly believe in institutions to that extent are the boomers and it'd be a tough sell to even them.

It became unfashionable when the general public realized it was also commonly used to, say, lock up and lobotomize women for wanting to vote, or divorce their husband.

Your child is "difficult"? To the asylum it is!

Circa 2015 when the reformulation of meth made it more likely to induce psychosis — as the new flow chemistry version altered which isomers were made.

At least, in Seattle.

What is the new formulation? How does it differ at a chemical level?

It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

It began in 1953 when thorazine was introduced on the premise that it would allow previously institutionalized people to live normal lives with only outpatient care. This turbocharged the movement to shutter mental institutions, and their populations began to crater around 1956. [0] For a lot of people, thorazine and its descendants have been nothing short of miraculous and have lived up to the promise. But not for everyone, and in the name of charity and respect for individual autonomy, we have chosen to allow these people to either live in awful conditions and fend for themselves or do something prison-worthy. So, while there isn’t great data on homelessness from before the 21st century, the root cause of much of it - a societal refusal to recognize certain people as requiring lifelong care for mental illness - begins in 1953. [0] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...

The advert in the Wikipedia page for chlorpromazine (aka thorazine) has some... vivid imagery.

FWIW you should clarify: do you mean mentally unstable people on streets, or do you mean any form of homelessness (living in cars, surfing on friends couch, etc). Because that second category is much larger and includes a lot of sincere people who are basically just priced out of the area that grew up in

Feels like it’s been a last ten years thing in Portland too - covid locked in the whole “it’s okay for people to pitch a tent on the sidewalk and set warming fires” thing

In China, it has more to do with putting drug users into labor camps: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure-fo...

> massive population of antisocial people

'Social' isn't 'nobody annoys me'; it's empathy for, caring about, and helping others, especially those you don't like - otherwise it means nothing.

I'm in the West, and I support liberty - the defining feature of the West - uber alles; it's their right. I'm not threatening others' freedom so you can feel more at ease. (You are more of a problem for them - they can't have you locked up.)

There has to be a line draw somewhere. Generally people who say this don't actually have regular interactions with aggressive, hostile, homeless. Or are you just really cool with going to a coffee shop and have someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?

The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?

Forced rehab if needed and then somewhere they can work to pay their way, learn the skills to help themselves. There's a ton of manual labor that needs doing, potholes to be fixed.

Oh, so forced labour then?

If someone’s forcing society to pay for their living expenses, it only seems fair for society to force them to labor to cover the expenses.

I’m sure the next objection will be “what, so you’re going to concentrate them in some kind of camp?” Yes because that’s the smart thing to do with a large scale problem. Use scalable solutions.

>If someone’s forcing society to pay for their living expenses,

But the mentally unwell person didn't force society to pay for their living expenses. Society decided it couldn't stand them living their life the way they were and locked them up.

Society pays for locking people up because it is done for the benefit of society. The point is that a functioning society is more productive than an unorganized one, and so can afford to do that kind of thing.

If they're doing lots of vandalism then yes put them in prisons. Get rid of 90% of drug charges to make room.

You get a much better score if the imprisonment is trying to rehab them, of course.

If they are committing crimes, they should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).

If they are mentally ill and unable to care for themselves or pose a threat to the community because of their mental illness, they should be institutionalized and treated. If they are able to be released into the community after a period of time, checks should be performed to ensure compliance with treatment/medication.

I think you need to fix the cause not treat the symptom. I mean you should treat the symptoms as well, while fixing the cause of the issue.

Atm it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to treat the symptom, and they don't even know why, and they keep completely quiet about the cause of it all. Completely and utter mystery, or framed vague and unfixable enough that they do not have to really address it.

What the Swiss did back in the 80's with the heroin program...that's misinterpreted by US and they're specifically trying to mess it up in application. The Swiss didn't just give lab grade heroin to junkies, they ran a serious mental care and social reintegration program and used the heroin as basically bait. You had access to it but you had to go to their facilities where specialized people could start working with you.

What the US is doing is a mockery of that, they want it to fail so they can say it's not working and they shouldn't even try it in the future.

And I think it's quite clear to basically anyone with two neurons what the cause of it is, but authorities there are going to pretend they do not understand it. That it's some mystical unexplainable cause.

Right now, many places in the US aren’t even “treating the symptoms”.

We can start there, then move to address the more structural, long-term problems that contribute to these issues.

An action that reduces drug use by 5% a decade from now is fine, but taking a criminal off the street today yields far greater present value.

The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilities that are (or were) downstream from removing threats to the common good from the public square.

Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.

Lacking a house isn't a threat to others. I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm. Annoying you isn't harm. Making rich people uncomfortable isn't a crime.

> common good

A term used to justify taking away liberty from people you don't like - 'it might take away their rights, but it's good for people in 'common''. The point of government, as Jefferson eloquently put it in the document that birthed the US, is to protect people's rights.

"I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm" is an absurd statement.

It's an old study, but Martell in Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City found that "The rate of violent crimes was 40 times higher and the rate of nonviolent crimes 27 times higher in the homeless population".

Most people don't like mentally ill homeless people who commit violent crime at a rate 40 times higher than average. Remind me what right in the Constitution enshrines your ability to crack the skull of a 70 year old nurse on the ground, then wander off and go to sleep? https://abcnews.com/US/70-year-nurse-killed-random-assault-b...

> It's an old study, but Martell in Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City found that "The rate of violent crimes was 40 times higher and the rate of nonviolent crimes 27 times higher in the homeless population".

It is indeed old (1995 [0]) and that's not what the paper studied or concluded. First, the study did not gather data on the homeless population, but on mentally ill people already in the criminal justice system:

* "The authors analyzed data from ... records of 77 homeless defendants and 107 domiciled defendants referred for psychiatric examination by the criminal and supreme courts ..."

Second, the paper's goals were to gather needed data on homelessness among mentally ill people in the criminal justice system, and to examine the interactions between homelessness and crime among mentally ill people:

* "The study aimed to estimate the prevalence of homelessness among mentally disordered offenders entering the criminal justice andforensic mentalhealth systems, to compare base rates of arrest for violent and nonviolent criminal charges among homeless and domiciled persons with mental illness, and to examine patterns in the categories of victims chosen ..."

Third, the conclusion was that, among mentally ill people generally (not only those charged [1]) those homeless were ~35x more likely to be charged with crimes than those domiciled, and it was somwhat even more likely that those crimes would be violent or against strangers (there's more detail in the paper). The paper says nothing about crime among the homeless population generally.

> absurd

> crack the skull of a 70 year old nurse

Do pejoratives and outrage make it more persuasive or less? More importantly, do they make it more likely or less likely that you find and express truth?

I think much less likely, because it means 1) You are dismissing a lot of information, 2) You are not examining the matter thoughtfully (being outraged), and 3) You likely have little better argument.

That also makes it less persuasive to people who are thinking critically.

[0] When crime rates were much higher. The paper: Martell, D. A., Rosner, R., & Harmon, R. B. (1995). Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City. Psychiatric Services, 46(6), 596–601. https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.46.6.596

[1] Note that they gathered data only on mentally ill people charged with crimes and not on the general population of mentally ill people. The latter group's data they took from the same author's prior research.

Can you provide any evidence that homeless people are equally or less likely to commit crimes, compared to the general population?

Look, if you make a claim - that homeless people are dangerous - then the burden of proof is on you.

A scientist doesn't say, 'there's life on Venus, prove me wrong'. A lawyer doesn't say 'you burnt down the house, prove me wrong'. They have to prove their claim. Otherwise, nobody responds - in science they'd be ignored, in court the defense doesn't even need to say a word.

Otherwise, we just don't know. I gave you the respect of taking your argument seriously, and of finding and reading your citation, even as you were hurling abuse and outrage (and maybe hadn't read it yourself, it seems). If you will step up now and contribute, you'll find a welcome reception and an interesting life and discussion. You can contribute. Someone else probably cited that quote and paper, and didn't read it, and look where it left you. You can do better than them, you can find some actual truth - and we'd both learn things, I'm certain.

But now you just don't know, admit it. Your assertion is possible of course, but IME it's also possible otherwise - homeless people are among the most vulnerable. For example, is the crime rate among homeless people more or less than the crime rate in corporate executive offices or on Wall Street or in the offices of elected representatives - I could see it either way. I just don't know.

You gave an anecdote that "I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm". I'm saying do you have any evidence beyond your assertion from personal experience that homeless people are safe?

You're making a claim that homeless people are safe, a claim that flies in the face of most people's experience and common sense.

It also flies in the face of the data:

"In 2022 the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office reported that homeless individuals were 514 times more likely to be arrested and charged with a felony and were often facing multiple criminal cases. The data shows substantially higher rates of robbery, residential burglary, assault, arson, and vandalism. " - https://www.sdcda.org/content/MediaRelease/Homeless%20Data%2...

"Los Angeles Police Department crime data from 2018 to 2021 shows that homeless individuals, while only 1 percent of the population, are suspects in 6 to 8 percent of all crimes and 11 to 15 percent of violent crimes." - https://abc7.com/feature/homeless-crime-los-angeles-data-res...

You're welcome to admit you are wrong about the precious "unhoused" who are committing assault at a rate 130x times greater than normal people in San Diego, or you can keep trying to deflect about Wall Street. $20 says you're the same type of person that thinks a pitbull is a safe nanny dog.

The contempt seems like a pattern - toward homeless people, toward me, toward facts and anything and everyone else that don't fit what you want. It's not persuasive or interesting, and contempt seems pretty strongly correlated with not knowing, learning (essential to knowing), or caring about the actual facts or anyone else. It's also not respectful and incompatible with freedom - that other people can validly do and think things that make you uncomfortable.

Why would anyone take these comments seriously? Why would I spend my time on them? I think I will be moving on. I hope you have a good rest of your day.

> hey should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).

And to prevent them from committing crime for some time. That might need to be a very, very long time. It is the most important reason to lock people up, sometimes.

Living in Seattle, people focus a lot on the homeless because it's an obvious problem. The guy screaming at the corner, or the people sleeping on the sidewalk.

But I personally think people miss that its a symptom of greater social rot. I've had more issues with antisocial car drivers than any homeless individual. People screaming profanities because I'm crossing the street with the walk signal active, people narrowly missing me as they speed to work. Just yesterday my entire block lost power because a drunk asshole tboned another car going 75mph, killing a family of four while nearly shearing a utility pole.

The reality is that even if the line is drawn with the homeless the undercurrent of social rot is still there and it's not getting better. And I don't see people calling for car drivers to be institutionalized, quite the opposite in most cases even when they commit homicide.

In a lot of large cities, local governments reacted to the 2020-2023 protests against police brutality by drastically reducing traffic enforcement. Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences. When voters elect leaders like Katie Wilson this is one of the inevitable consequences.

This is just false, considering I've lived across the US. My experience has been pretty universally the same whether or not I lived in Texas, Virginia or Washington. People that are incredibly sheltered like to believe that it's unique to their city, or the result of partisan politics but the reality is that the rot is deeper than that. One of the most famous examples was in deep red Texas: Ethan Couch.

1. The cities didn't 'react' to those protests by reducing enforcement, cops started quiet-quitting.[1]

2. Katie Wilson was elected last fucking year, replacing a pro-cop, pro-establishment incumbent, whereas the usual suspects have been bitching about Seattle for decades. Par for the course, of course, the usual newspapers were running hit pieces about how her failed policies have ruined the city a day after she took office, without a shred of self-reflection.

[1] Wasn't so long ago that Seattle's top-paid cop ($390,000/year!) was caught collecting overtime by napping in her car... Illegally parked in the middle of a bus-only lane. (I guess that's also Katie's fault, despite it being a year prior to her election.)

> drastically reducing traffic enforcement.

I haven't heard of that, other than laws banning pulling people over for minor mechanical issues like broken tailights (used sometimes as coverup for prejudice). Could you give examples?

> Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences.

I haven't noticed driving getting worse, except around the pandemic. Is there data?

You can’t even get pulled over for having no plates at all in Seattle.

There is something not right with many Seattle-area residents. Some weird combination of anger issues, low self-esteem, and terrible driving skills. I moved to SoCal earlier this year and have seen much less rage and incompetence on the roads. I don’t get flipped off on a daily basis anymore for driving a particular polarizing electric car. No more pairs of Subarus going 5-10 under, blocking the whole road and inducing rage in the lineup of cars.

I see and interact with apparently unhoused people all the time, and I've never had a problem.

> someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?

This is a hypothetical, and follows a typical pattern of trying to box people into a response using a situation that effectively never happens. It's like people asking if you'd support torture 'if you knew there was a bomb in an elementary school somewhere in NY, but didn't know which one'. That's never happened.

I have had many apparently housed people yell at or even threaten me, and almost run me over.

So I've never seen it or anything like it, spending lots of time in many neighborhoods of many cities. Human shit, to provoke an emotional reaction (of disgust) at other humans, is a favorite of the anti-freedom crowd. It's not the unhoused people, generally the most vulnerable people I know and encounter, that disgust me.

The primary shelter for my city is across the road from me. All the strung out, chronic homeless people hang out next door at the post office, because it's public property. They also hang out around my building, on the two streets around it.

There is never shit. There are no needles. These people leave you alone. They are literally insane and on absurd drugs, but they leave you alone.

Why is this true in Portland Maine, but not Portland Oregon?

By definition, destroying public utilities is antisocial. Antisocial behavior is a huge problem in the US.

> Antisocial behavior is a huge problem in the US.

You'll have to back that up. It's said a lot by people who want to take away freedom from those they dislike, trying to justify it by creating some state of emergency.

Crime is the lowest it's been in the lifetime of most Americans. I do see high antisocial behavior among wealthy, powerful people - should we jail them? They cause a lot more harm than dirty bathrooms.

I kind of never said the problem is too much freedom, in fact I think the problem is unrelenting abuse and neglect rather than lack of control. But I don't have sources on me, I'll try to remember to explain more later.

I was picking up some lumber today (USA) and they were blaring some country song about "Try that in a small town" which was basically a gun owner's fantasy about shooting people. One of the lines was something like "we look out for our own". And that right there describes half the USA: outsiders not welcomed. ingroup/outgroup is nothing new, and its not like any country has really fixed it, and the countries that have seemed to "figure it out" are wildly racist (Nordic countries, Japan, etc.) or authoritarian (China), but that's that underlying attitude: it an outsider's fault. And even IF you are "one of their own" and you fall off the wagon, you find yourself with a bus ticket to a Blue State sanctuary city courtesy of your local Red Leaders.

I live in a city that is a dumping ground where Red States have bussed the homeless populations -- out of sight out of mind -- and even before this, homelessness was a growing due to skyrocketing rents, medical costs, and simply falling behind the treadmill. And now gave crazy new drugs, crazy new inflation, and even more unchecked greed, there's really no stopping this so called "antisocial" behavior.

Why care about a society when it doesn't give a fuck about you>?

Then again, when I was in college in the mid-80s, Freshman year a bunch of young white engineering boys in my dorm were laughing about how they smeared shit all over the bathroom walls of a McDonalds. So, it's been going on forever, but now the scale is massive. I include "white" because a lot of people think this is a non-white, non-rich, non-christian problem.

Portland?

Someday! Two more choices. ;)

It takes a brave person to be selfless. The golden rule is how.

That thing about cities bussing their homeless elsewhere seems to be a pretty common urban myth. I don't think anyone has really shown that it's definitively happening on any large scale manner. And it should be relatively easy to show given that governments publish their budgets.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas openly bragged about bussing the state's homeless to California for years.

Abbot does the same thing; he simply doesn't brag about it anymore.

The LAT did a series of articles (back in 2018, and sporadically since then) in which Steve Lopez tried to humanize the homeless in Hollywood. It took him over 2 days to find someone who has actually a local. The vast majority of the homeless came from...Texas. They were given bus tickets by local authorities and told that California would overlook their drug issues and even give them free drugs.

The last census I saw of the Los Angeles homeless population found that the percentage of homeless people in LA that were never housed in LA was higher than either the percentage of homeless people who had a severe mental illness or substance abuse issue.

Right, that was my point. Most of LA's homeless aren't from LA. They're not our homeless.

My understanding is a lot of it is voluntary migration. If you you're not paying rent, you don't have a job, and you've burned all your social support ties, you might as well get a greyhound to a place with good weather, good social services, and where people will look the other way on your visible symptoms of mental illness and drug addictions.

It's not a myth.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

So not exactly the same thing, but in the Phoenix metro area the homeless population probably triples during the months when it's not 100 degrees plus. I've always assumed, with no evidence whatsoever, that there's some NGO that moves homeless from more northern latitudes to southern ones, and back, depending on the season, mostly because it just makes sense.

Arrogance has nothing to do with race. Those assholes had zero discipline.

That was literally my point. Take a breath.

Antisocial people who destroy the public facility don't just come out of nowhere. People get driven to this. Not to say that you can simply ignore them when they're already everywhere, though.

People aren't driven to this, they escalate to this when there are no consequences attached to lesser antisocial behavior.

> no consequences

Usually if you are extremely poor or extremely rich there are no consequences for you. The extremely poor are desperate and have nothing to lose, society already took everything from them. The extremely rich are above the law. As inequality increases crime increases with it, from vandalism to financial crimes.

This is why equality is so important. When the average Joe has a good job, good salary, and a home then can lose things that society has helped him to get and can take away.

I agree.

A simple and unremarkable person could once upon a time have their basic factory job (or similar), make enough to own their home, and have a decent unremarkable life with their family. I think the pressures of housing costs or rent and other costs of living squeezed those people, often to distress. It's obviously not the entirety of a solution, but it's surely part of it.

"People" are not some evil force that fundamentally grows antisocial when not kept in check. There's overwhelming evidence that people want to be good. There are entire countries of good people that treat their people well, where even criminals don't become antisocial like this. (Example: Norway)

People act bad like this not because they're any more particularly free to, but because they're given incentives to. People get slighted by their county, state or the federal government, and everybody else shuns them. It's normal and practically expected to ignore homeless people, for example, and even blame them for their condition. The rich and the lucky are hostile and entitled, while the poor and mentally ill are harassed and taken advantage of. People get radicalized, even trained to commit worse crimes by what's expected of them. Nothing else gets attention or achieves anything.

It's never been about consequences, people do this whether it'll get them 25 years or not. People do this whether they'll get caught or not. They do it because they think it needs to be done, they think it's deserved and they want to get back for everything that's been taken from them and caused to them. And for that, everybody hates them and treats them like everything that's wrong with the country. When in reality, what's wrong with the country is what's creating people like this. Seeing violent criminals makes me sad for what they suffered, not angry at them for being the problem.

What exactly (supposedly) drives someone to destroy public facilities?

Mental illness

Puberty.

Eh. There‘s a cultural background factor to this.

Culture is a significant part of how people end up this way, yes. Culture is not, however, a get-out-of-jail-free card that excuses the conditions that cause people to become like this.

I assume you're talking about software engineers, because in every office I've worked in the toilets have been absolutely filthy by mid-morning.

At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.

I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.

What worries you about the boot marks specifically?

Is this a serious question? Maybe people don't want to put their bare ass down on filthy bootprints.

He didn't didn't want to be the SECOND person squatting with boots!

Well that first guy didn’t want to put his butt where other guy’s butts have been, that’d be pretty gross.

Exactly.

People are asses. Don’t assume you know everybody’s history.

Maybe the guy is one legged and has to jump on the toilet seat to keep his balance.

More likely it's someone from India (or much less likely China) refusing to use the facilities as intended.

> boot marks

"So, Inspector Lestrade, ..."

That seems hard to believe. I've been in many tech company offices around the US and they're usually fine.

Where is your office located? What are the national origins of your co-workers?

> That seems hard to believe. I've been in many tech company offices around the US and they're usually fine.

> What are the national origins of your co-workers?

Probably Indian or South Asian.

Look at how dirty they behave in their own community (Sunnyvale, California)

Meanwhile bathrooms and in nearby Cupertino, Mountain View and even San Jose are much cleaner.

There's tons of Indians in Cupertino and Mountain View as well, so I don't know what your comment was trying to prove, apart from openly displaying your prejudice and racism.

> At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.

Are you complaining no one cleaned it up, including you? Or are you complaining that the company didn't get cleaning services?

I'm saying the presence of the boot marks make me less likely to clean up any mess I make in there.

> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.

What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.

in japan the homeless people clean up after themselves and don’t destroy everything

what’s the difference here?

My first thought is, I'm not certain their homeless are different in their behavior, but based on what little I know, I'm rather certain their non-homeless are. I'd expect disruption or damage to a public space of the kind that sparked this discussion to be dealt with swiftly as a high priority.

I don't know much about this, but when I visited Japan, I walked aimlessly in the outskirts of Tokyo (Sumida city) until I ended up in a homeless area. They had used old palettes and tarps to build square houses with functioning doors, and it was surprisingly clean. Their shoes were neatly lined up against the walls, they used trash bags and the ground was clean. It was quite a culture shock, because it was cleaner than non-homeless streets at home.

You can't build that kind of shanty town in the US because the cops will come and steal all your shit. Otherwise it's exactly what homeless people in the US want to be able to do.

Often times, these "sweeps" just trash everything. Imagine if you were trying to put your life back together. You got an Obamaphone so you can call state assistance programs and email job prospects. You have some basic clothes, maybe some food, maybe some few possessions you have saved from your past life.

Then the cops come and take all of it and throw it away.

Gee, I wonder why it's so hard for people to escape homelessness in the US?

Imagine trying to live any life in a world that rejected your right to property?

They are Japanese.

Japan will lock people up for a long period of time if they show the sort of anti-social behavior that the most visible homeless people in North America are famous for.

The trains run on time sure enough.

The US “locks people up” at a much higher rate, and for longer, than Japan does. About 1% of the adult population is in jail in the United States, and it’s about 0.03% of the population in Japan. The US puts people in jail at 30x the rate Japan does.

It is not because the US doesn’t lock people up enough.

Japan has one of the highest numbers of psychiatric beds in the world. That's what I'm referring to. If you're experiencing psychosis in public in Japan, you will be removed from public spaces. This is not true in the US.

Thank “One flew over cuckoos nest” for that.

Yes it is. It’s because they let them out again.

That is 1% of adults being CURRENTLY locked up, not people who have ever been locked up in their life. That means the stat already factors in how long they are in for.

We are not talking jail, we are talking closed institution. The kind of hospital you check in but do not check out from, as many mental illnesses are incurable.

Buddy, I can deprive you of several days of sleep, put you under severe emotional duress and have you experience a psychotic breakdown. Are you seriously saying you yourself should then be locked up for life?

Are you saying that someone experiencing a psychotic breakdown should not get psychiatric care?

Try to be charitable in your interpretation.

Yeah my charitable interpretation is that it's all just a thin veneer over your main argument which is "kill the poor"

many ≠ all; chronic ≠ acute

I tried to find some information about how Japan manages to get away from criticisms around forced labor in prison. It seems like Japan does have very poorly paid labor, as little as usd 0.05 an hour, but the incarceration rate is low.

Once again, I don't know much about Japan but I doubt there is a large ethnic minority that is only about fifteen percent of the population but somehow accounts for almost half of all incarcerated people in Japan.

From Google:

> Low Incarceration Rates: Japan maintains one of the lowest incarceration rates in the developed world (roughly 35 to 40 prisoners per 100,000 residents, compared to over 500 per 100,000 in the US).

How many of their homeless are addicted to drugs or nectary ill? It seems in the US almost all visible homeless fall into at least one of those groups.

Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it. The only country I found that had previously had a meth issue was Estonia or Latvia (not sure anymore). It apparently was really bad for years. They fixed it by finding the single meth lab. Not a solution that's viable for us.

No idea what Japan does with its homeless but my money is that it's something like forced admission which isn't gonna fly in the US.

> Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it.

It isn't a particular drug: if it isn't Fentanyl or meth it will be something else, whatever is available. In the UK it is a mixed bag, but for many the problem substance is alcohol which isn't controllable the way other drugs are because of it being legal and so commonly used in a non (or at least less) problematic manner.

The problem hits from two directions: many homeless people start the path to addiction by needing an escape and that escape method spirals and takes control, and a lot (not the majority by any means, but a sizable segment) end up destitute because of spiralling substance problems to start with.

Of course many homeless do not have a substance problem, or at least not one that would be insurmountable on its own. Financial issues (that wouldn't go away if you strip the cost of the illicit substances out, accommodation is not cheap and suitable jobs are not readily available, etc) and mental illness (separating this from drug issues is complex: "self medication" is of course a major complicating matter) are probably far more common.

> curious how other countries dealt with it

Not well, for the most part. From an outsiders PoV (sat in my small but comfortable flat with the paid mortgage and no drug issues, though the mental health thing needs work) it doesn't seem to be a bad as it has been in the past (maybe in part due to efforts to make it less visible rather than fixing the issues?) but is growing again and I suspect will do so more rapidly if AI does what it promises to the job market.

I was under the impression that the more recent type of meth leads to symptoms indistinguishabl from schizophrenia that last many month of abstinence. Source: https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t...

Most Asian countries are pretty serious about keeping drugs out of their countries. In Japan's case it's a little easier since they're an island nation.

You can get a life sentence there for first offense import or manufacture of narcotics. Beyond that, your family will suffer socially.

That’s my exact point. Our culture in the west breeds isolation and antisocial chaos in a not insignificant percent of the population. Part of it os undoubtedly the vast differences between Japanese and American culture

We in the west have surrendered with weak punishments and lax enforcement for anti social behaviour. In many cases even abolishing laws or putting in place public policy that prevents the imprisonment of people who commit "low level" crimes. There's a certain segment of the population who will (largely unsuccessfully) try to shame you if you promote a tough on crime approach.

In my country the entire justice system has been hijacked by activist judges who are hell bent on promoting these whacky ideas and letting serious criminals go virtually unpunished.

I'm just not sure that stronger punishment and enforcement is going to be the answer here. It seems like many of the Asian cultures have a much higher level of social cohesion even without the threat of punishment. How do we get (back) to higher social cohesion in the West? I recall seeing a film of a shanty town somewhere in the US during the Great Depression. It was very neat and tidy. What happened between then and now?

America has a low social cohension because of global immigration instead of targeted immigration compare to China. America use to share a culture because people came from the same places and shared the same religion and had a common history going back to the Romans.

....sadly more true than anyone here would probably like to admit. I love having Indian coworkers and there’s a large Indian population where I am at, but they are just completely separated in every single way from everyone else. and they keep it that way.

my Pakistani coworkers are absolutely wonderful. Sweet, hard-working, very enjoyable to talk to, but their families and lives are just a totally different universe and they don’t share it.

The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. i’ve seen inside some of the homes, and they are filled with independent black power movie posters about shooting Whitey. No kidding.

I know it takes a village, but when people are so very different and forced to be near each other, it doesn’t mean that they will socialize or help each other; it’s like living on two different planets. there’s all kinds of social research showing this now, and what you get is micro segregation along income lines, rather than everyone helping each other and lifting up the community together.

I wanted for most of my life for people to get along and the world to be a better place, thinking that education and modern access to information could somehow make things better. It seems that was entirely and completely wrong. when people have any kind of discomfort at all about new culture or new person or new idea? They pretty much just run away.

The people here on hacker news are probably an exception, because we are here searching for commentary and interesting ideas and new information.

What an awful society you live in.

It is not like that where I live.

The first generation of immigrants have trouble, natural enough. But are very keen that their children do better.

As for racism: Most racism here is systemic, from the state. There is casual ignorant racism, of course, but little hate.

What a mess has been made of your country. You should work to fix it.

It took us a lot of work to get here, and we have a long way to go. But I cannot imagine living in a society such as you describe.

Where I’m from, Sweden, typically it is the second and third generation immigrants who exhibit antisocial behaviour.

Its true im many places. First generation hard working. Second generation lives in the inprint of the first generation. Third generation has no connection to the original homeland and tries to find connection or it turns to antisocial behaviour.

The first generation could hardly be classified as “hard working”, the sad fact is many of them live on (generous) welfare.

You only have to look at Trump; third generation immigrant.

His grandfather made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in Whitehorse during the Gold Rush years, his father compounded that with an actual real estate 'empire' and the grandson 'earnt' money via dodgy wealth transfer schemes and sank much of it into get rich quick scams and branding deals based on fraudulent representation and money laundering, now leading the country in historic levels of open corruption.

Ok, this is very different from the situation in Sweden. Many were analphabets and live completely segregated from mainstream society with little hope(or wish) to integrate with Swedish society.

I agree with your analysis of the Trump family who have been detrimental for US society.

Near as I can tell, Trump III is also an analphabet, living completely segregated from mainstream society with little hope(or wish) to integrate with Swedish society (or US for that matter).

Good point.

Questions for Sweden might be "How did the US integrate all the illiterate Irish?" (and should they do the same), "How did Australia integrate many non English speaking / writing Vietnamese 'boat people'?", etc.

Unless Sweden in majority is prepared to broom out all that they have accepted in, then this how it is, a mix of cultures having to find common directions and minimise friction over the next generation and a half.

These are valid questions the western Europe dodged for far too long. Looking the other way created the rightwing monster of today.

Worth specifying that this also applies to the "good" immigrants such as the Poles, not just the much vilified Muslims. The kids of Polish immigrants really struggle. And if you go a generation back, the Vietnamese boat refugees had similar issues: their kids really had issues, there were Vietnamese criminal gangs in Oslo in the 90s. The ex-Yugoslav organized crime groups were maybe more notable in that they were often first generation, but they're mostly a memory too by now. Then there's the "hapas", children of Asian women who immigrated by marrying native men. Scandinavia hasn't seen much trouble with them - yet. But I think there's some danger here, online I've seen some worrying communities.

I think identity rootlessness is an underestimated factor in immigration woes. Youth of all kinds can often be exploited into adopting a destructive self-identity, but some groups are more vulnerable. One notorious Swedish gang actively recruits from the foster care system.

I think less people expected those to cause generational trouble and so a common pro-migration argument 1-2 decades ago was that these people from mena regions would assimilate. After all the people from (in our case italy) mostly already did.

It's wild to see how this flipped completely around in such a short time and now some markers of integration seem to go backwards and at the same time some consider it biggoted to demand/expect assimilation.

or the third generation are just natives at that point, and will commit crimes at a similar rate to the native populace?

> The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit.

Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them?

The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offer to maintain smoke detectors. (It probably didn't hurt that I was also good for bumming cigarettes off of and slowing down to have a chat.)

YMMV, but showing up and doing work was apparently what my neighbors in East St. Louis and Atlanta wanted.

Wait, so the smoke detector thing is real? I assumed it was just a racist stereotype.

It's something of a meme that's grounded in reality, but it's honestly less grounded in race and ethnicity than it is in socioeconomic status.

That said, there's a joke that the white people version of this is the little bug in the lower right corner of the Windows desktop background that tattles on you for not having activated.

Which, like, y'know, that's fair.

This is exactly my experience. I moved into a black neighborhood and it's real bad for me. My neighbor, a white elderly woman, organizes sort of community events, but it's 90% white people from nicest houses.

> a common history going back to the Romans.

Native Americans are not related to Romans.

Slaves brought by force from Africa neither.

Neither of those two groups were citizens of America historically.

Which Asian cultures are you speaking about which have high social cohesion without threat of punishment? Singapore will punish anti-social behaviour like vandalism with mandatory caning, or fine you heavily for jay walking. In Japan police will intervene much more readily in cases of public intoxication and even noise complaints.

For more serious anti social behaviour like gun crimes, violent crimes and drug trafficking there are very strong mandatory penalties up to and including corporal punishment and execution.

Conviction rates in these countries are upwards of 99%. So in cases of intervention a punishment is almost certain.

Is the problem social cohesion or mental illness and meth and fentanyl addiction?

Stronger punishments? Probably not, but better enforcement? I believe so.

It has repeatedly been shown that the severity of punishment does not sway crime nearly as much as the certainty of punishment does [1]. This all feels like a byproduct of the hyper-individualism we have in the West and the US, especially.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/670398

Indeed. Wasn't there a study where a policeman stationed on a street corner decreased crime or something even if he was just standing there doing nothing? Like a scarecrow effect.

Of course people will come out and scream Gestapo! And talk about their freedoms, but are the only two choices in life complete anarchy and a police state? Can't we live somewhere in the middle like a reasonable society? It's really just slippery slope fallacies all the time like either we don't police at all or do north korea style surveillance.

Also the demonization of police, the need is to have better police, not no police! It's just absurd what people come up with, it's so unreasonable yet these ideas gain such a large following.

there are police booths on many street corners in urban areas of china. they're very common, and people don't act afraid of them. the most common interaction you see is people asking them for directions

Sorry I don't understand your reply. Are you agreeing with me? The police booth is not to make you afraid. The idea is that it would deter pickpockets and other petty crime just by being there, regardless of whether the booth was meant to do so or not. Yes it could just be a almost retired security guard inside giving out directions but that would still work better than nothing at all.

The United States is certainly part of the west, and we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR.

The idea that we are soft on crime is insane.

Harsher punishments do not lead to lower crime.

> we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR

Crime is committed at a higher rate than in any other advanced nation, though some of the others are catching up.

> The idea that we are soft on crime is insane

Not even a little bit insane. There are a million criminal laws on the books that do not get enforced at all. For example, I live in a state that is stereotypically conservative and "tough on crime" and any marijuana-related products are strictly illegal, most often at the felony level; yet I constantly smell it while driving on the road, no less! People are smoking while driving all the time. This cannot be described as anything but soft on crime.

The US system was overall built by and for people who are largely self-governing. This philosophy gets in the way of a true hard-on-crime pivot.

And yet your prisons are full of people in jail for marijuana related crimes.

Because putting people in prison for weed does not stop people smoking weed.

You don't go to jail for possession of weed in most US states. You won't even go to jail for dealing unless you've been busted multiple times or you're moving heavy weight.

When you see statistics about people incarcerated on marijuana charges, what they normally obscure is either that's not the only charge or they pled down from something more serious.

There isn't a single person in federal custody there for marijuana possession and only that.

As others have pointed out the US has a massive prison population.

Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.

Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for

This is what China has done. Aside from drug crimes it doesn't seem like they punish any harsher than the rest of the world, they just have an incredibly good ability to follow up. If you smash the window of a store, they will find you and you'll have to pay for it. Just the knowledge that there is an almost 100% chance of having to pay to restore anything you break seems all that's needed to stop the destruction of public spaces.

On the less extreme end, Europe also has much higher rates of catching criminals and punishes then less. I understand the US is really the outlier.

I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.

I don't think the police is underfunded in the US though?

It simultaneously is and isn't. It's overfunded on things that don't matter for the problem at hand - traffic enforcement using full fledged officers in expensive vehicles, militarized SWAT teams, regulations requiring huge officer presence at all events, etc. But it's underfunded on what would change things for the better - foot patrols, investigation, etc.

This is why you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in the US and have 3 police cars behind you complete with a K9 unit, but if that same car gets stolen, you'll probably get asked to make a report and never hear a peep from the police again.

Reminds me of a story I read recently where they deployed a SWAT team to deliver a letter. I thought it must have been fake, but maybe not..

(It was news because the old building's stairs couldn't support the weight of the SWAT team and collapsed, injuring many of them.)

Look at officers per 100k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... France has 422, Germany 349, Italy 456, US 242. There are countries that are super safe like Japan and Singapore with only 255 and 174 but I think it's safe to say that the US probably is better compared to France here. China also has only 258 but I think they make up for it through surveillance which isn't welcome in the US.

The US also doesn't train police officers well compared to most European countries. In the US it takes just a few months to become a police officer. In Germany it takes years.

Very good conversation on the general topic: https://youtu.be/6gMwh3jkWy0?is=MiTI5N1wdEpd_izP

The thing there that the West has not been able to accept to achieve this is the surveillance state. Just look at Flock.

I'm not sure anyone has really cracked how to get it done without that part, though certainly tweaking the spending from prisons to police would help a lot. The trouble in the US at least is people (rightly) don't trust police, and don't want to give them more power, so it also needs to be paired with reform on that front for the population to accept it.

Because cameras alone do nothing useful, and there's precious little evidence these are being used to help address petty vandalism.

The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.

So how come the weak-on-crime Western European countries are not drowning in homeless drug addicts?

It's probably the difference you can also notice between Switzerland and Germany for example. Take rough sleeping: in Germany it's there (no, not LA-style but still noticeable). In Switzerland they get immediately rounded up and taken to a shelter, no "muh freedom" discussion just housed. Add warm meals and a community and the light at the end of the tunnel starts to be be noticed. Of course mentally ill will come out again, so at some point they will have to be institutionalized. Nobody belongs on the streets, no matter what the gop is telling.

There's a growing amount of visible homlessness near here in Brussels and the other big cities in Belgium and a lot of other western european cities

Influences related to migration have overwhelmed whatever support systems there are to tackle this.

> We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness

SF would beg to differ. They have a budget of $100k per homeless person. They can't solve the problem because the problem is not money

The problem is money, but for preventing homelessness and mental illness in the first place.

And still once I was ina small restaurant that let a homeless guy use the toilet and they forced the door open after hearing crashing sounds, and he had painted the walls with his poop and jumped up and down on the sink until it broke off.

Days later I saw a sign in their window saying the bathroom was for customers only.

Something to keep in mind is that that figure includes homeless people who have been homed and are being supported, it's not just the ones currently on the streets.

Spending money is necessary but not sufficient to fix this sort (or literally any sort?) of big problem.

I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)

I assure you, if they stopped spending that money tomorrow, things would get dramatically worse, as all the people that money keeps off the streets would be on them.

Do they spend $100,000 per homeless person in Europe and Asia? If not, why don't they have similar problems?

Closer familial ties + extremely harsh laws for drug sale and use. Asians realized how opium fucked China for a century and made sure none of that shit flies.

If they're spending money on, say, school lunches for poor kids and on substance abuse programs, they're not technically spending money on homeless people, but it's hard to see that the money that isn't being spent on the unhoused doesn't help people not become unhoused in the first place.

EU:

The social net prevents homelessness.

We don't get broke because of medical bills.

Labor laws prevent being fired without prévenance.

Being fired grants you employment benefits.

The vast majority of the homeless you see on the streets in the US are there no because of money trouble, but because of mental health or drug issues (or both).

People with money issues can almost always lean on friends or family. It’s the people that no longer have any friends or family willing to put up with them that end up on the streets.

Then the question becomes why US has such a huge problem with mental health and drugs that most other countries don't have with this scale. Maybe it's easier to develop mental health and/or drug issues when there are no societal safety nets, like accessible healthcare, decent affordable housing, unemployment benefits, ...

We really should go with a harsh Chinese solution. If you do drugs in China, you hope your dad is Jackie Chan or you are going to have a really hard life. And being caught homeless in a big city gets you a free escorted bus ticket back to the poor rural area your hukou is in, where you couldnt make it either.

The more western solutions are compassionate containment like in Finland.

America cant make up its mind if it wants to be like China or Finland.

I don't know why people seem to think the US has "no societal safety nets."

We have medicaid, unemployment benefits, how expensive our housing is completely depends on location just like other places (rural-ish areas are probably cheaper than almost all of Europe), etc.

I live in Berlin and there's a ton of homeless people on the streets. As bad as most major US cities (SF is worse, or at least was - I haven't visited in a few years).

As I remember, in Finland everyone is guaranteered an apartment, even if the person has no money.

google medical bankruptcy, zero (0) other first world countries deal with this concept

Spending less money more efficiently would not make the problem worse.

But currently housed people becoming street homeless would.

Unless you mean to say that you don't care either way if they do.

(If your value system places zero value on that, then my value system places positive value on spending your money on things you very explicitly don't value.)

This argument is so dumb. SF spends so profligately that a well–run system could spend less money and be just as effective, if not more effective. Nobody would be turned out onto the street just because less money was being spent. Half of that money is probably going to fraudsters who are bilking the government. A lot of it is probably being spent in useless ways that ensure that more money will be spent on the problem in the future, to keep the cash spigot running to the NGOs that profit from the homeless.

Just because you can spend money poorly doesn’t mean money isn’t needed to fix an issue.

What do you suggest the solution is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First

Insane Asylums.

Repeal all prohibition. It enriches cartels and incites corruption. Take all the money pissed up the wall fighting drug crime and spend it on treatment and rehab. Let corporations sell pharmaceutical grade drugs like heroin (junkies don't actually want fentanyl, it wears off too fast while heroin lasts for hours) and pay some fucking tax.

SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month, as at the cheaper rent saving money is actually possible.

We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect?

Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.

What you say is completely true, but part of the problem is that people have very different ideas of what they are talking about when they talk about homeless people.

People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.

I think the burden of proof is on your position. When activists in my area pick a fight with local government, it's never over that invisible group. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they don't give a rip about the veterans living in the forest over by the VA hospital. I've never seen them over there. They're too busy picking fights defending the ones pooping at the downtown parks (and not in the public toilet) or trying to get city funding and approval for safe drug use, etc.

Now, you're right that there are people that do care and put tremendous effort into that more invisible group. Churches and church-backed organizations do a lot of that. Difference is, except for fund-raising from like-minded folks (and a lot of them hate even asking for money), they go about their work quietly, without seeking attention or reward.

There'd be the possibility of joining forces, but not with the DSA-types that jump in the limelight and scream the loudest and advocate for free needles. The people doing the bulk of the hard work don't want to make a statement on Palestine, they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift. They need men willing to be mentors, etc. They care about the actual people they're serving, not trying to bring about glorious revolution. The two groups aren't compatible at the moment.

> they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift

This may sound like a loaded question, but I assure you, that's not my intention. If you want to provide for those "invisible" homeless, who aren't drug addicts or mentally ill, shouldn't the primary volunteer pool consist of exactly those invisible homeless people? Or in other words, once you have organizers, why do you need external volunteers for cleaning the showers?

Point in case - my 75-yr-old retired parents staff one of those church showers in one of the most affluent towns south of SF. They have time, because they're retired. The people using those showers can't volunteer, they have jobs they have to get to.

That's the point here, the invisible homeless are people who are _fully employed_ but they're still too poor to have homes to live in.

HN comments always seem to be driving in the right direction and then yank the steering wheel at the last moment.

Gotta be some kind of weather vane for you guys.

Please elaborate. Where does my comment leave the "right direction"?

how can a volunteer group only consist of one group of people?

surely then they aren't volunteering, but rather being volunteered

Being volunteered to help clean the facilities they depend on and otherwise get for free?

Thank you for being one of the few to draw a distinction there! The thing is, that second group are arguably already being helped by the many, many taxpayer-funded services we already have. They use the resources as intended to get back on their feet. I know it's not a fun time to be in that boat, but as long as it's a temporary boat and not a permanent predicament, it's not a societal emergency. To be clear, I'd support any reasonable policy specifically targeted and proven to help people who are in this situation.

One more thing:

> something as simple as lowering rent prices

Suppose you solve that (by market means, constructing an incredible amount of homes, or by communist means, by draconian rent-control cutting all rents by 70%). A 2-bedroom apartment in SF is now $1,200 and there are 50,000 of them vacant. Would these apartments not be immediately rented by 50,000 households from elsewhere who have always wanted to live there but haven't been able to afford it? Either the rents would shoot right back up if we're letting markets function, or the apartments would be insta-filled by a few very lucky people, with a years-long waiting list for any housing that ever opens up. There will always be one more person who will be happy to move to a great climate, top-tier city, unless the rents are obnoxiously high.

Rent control won't really solve the problem as it can only help people who already live in the city but makes rents even higher for new residents - there have been studies that essentially find that rent control essentially just transfers money from newer residents to ones who have lived here a long time. And worse, it a removes incentives for improving existing buildings and for current tenants to move, thereby reducing liquidity in the market - eg if you would like to upsize or downsize for whatever reason, being locked into a good rent controlled price is a strong disincentive.

The better solution is definitely "build an incredible amount of homes" though $1200 probably is not be obtainable even at extreme ends of possibility. We also should consider it a region wide problem and not just an SF problem - the whole bay area needs to build more, as rents in Oakland, Daly City, San Mateo, etc are related to SF prices as well. If the region is going to add jobs we better add housing at the same rate, and we've massively failed at that.

But anyway if the market actually starts functioning as new supply appears any tent decrease would incrementally attract some new tenants from elsewhere. Rents only shoot back up if the supply increase isn't sustained addition, or we somehow artificially lower rents for a short period. In a functioning market we should find an equilibrium price and when demand spikes faster than units can be built, be development would spring up that in a few years would push prices back towards normal (as jobs / the economy clearly moves faster than new housing can be constructed). But even in the booms when construction should be seeing the influx of people with high salaries and trying to develop new housing to keep up... Well, the volume of new housing just didn't keep up.

Many of the homeless don’t have jobs. They wouldn’t be able to afford rent in Bangladesh.

Becoming and then staying homeless for a significant time is often almost irreversible. The key is to prevent people from ever getting there, as much as you can - and that is the point the poster above was making. The fall from house + job > house > no house makes it very hard to ever get another job that actually pays enough to go back to having a house.

In Bangladesh someone can put up a plywood shack somewhere and call it their home

Anyone living in a tent city would most likely not only survive but thrive there

The tent city people here are all on meth and fent, sadly. That's why they're there. They can't thrive anywhere.

Semi-related anecdotes:

After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful.

In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple.

People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.

> SF - problem... is largely cost of housing

Are you talking about the homeless who are actually causing any problems (the chronic homeless)? Or the meaningless statistical group of "Everyone who doesn't have their own/rented home today"?

> Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month

Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. By virtue of not being mentally ill and addicted, everyone else has "friends" and "family" somewhere who would say "Oh, gee Fred, sorry you lost your job. Sleep on my couch for a few weeks while you're looking for work."

The only people who don't are those who have burned every bridge by repeatedly betraying the trust of those who love them (theft, bringing drugs into their home, sexual abuse, etc).

A lot of people also sleep in their cars and shower at the gym while putting their lives together. Now, those people DO count as homeless in the official counts, but they aren't the ones causing any problems, and they also consume only a tiny fraction of the public resources that "The Homeless" we see on the streets do.

So, while lower rents would help with the official numbers, you would see little improvement on the streets because that's not why they're there.

(All that said, I'm sure there's a small pipeline from the 'temp homeless' to the 'chronic homeless,' which is probably 99.9% made up of people who are in the "living in the car" or "couch surfing" phase who make the poor choices to take up an addiction to drown their sorrows.)

Separately, the other problem with the "just build more housing" plan is: These cities aren't surrounded by 50-foot walls. They're not closed systems. Say we build so much that the $3000 rent drops to $1000. Now, people from elsewhere, seeing that SF is now as cheap as Fresno, will decide to move there, as the weather is way better, and there are tons of cool things about living in a world-class city by the sea. The low prices pull people from elsewhere just as reliably as low air pressure causes wind to blow towards it. (This is also why these temperate coastal cities can't fix things with money: The more comfortable you make it to be homeless in your city, the more tweakers from the hinterland will gravitate to the city.)

> Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets.

This statement is very load-bearing in your whole argument though. Losing a job can completely derail a person's daily habits and cause their issues to worsen, either by the additional stress or by forgetting to keep their meds. It's downhill from there.

From about 2010 onwards we have had the phenomenon of the High-Income White Collar Itinerate - the Silicon Valley worker living in a converted van, or the remote coder working from a LOC country with low barriers to entry regarding Visas and Taxation. These being the 'privileged' demographic.

The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%.

https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/

The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s.

https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living...

In other news, U.S. Home Prices Are up 29 Percent Since 2019.

https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estat...

tl;dr Americans will vote for an Economy over a Society, so long as Social policies continue to be villainized in political discourse.

The problem is you can’t get people off the street if they don’t want to get off the street unless you do it forcibly. You can end the homeless problem overnight but SF is too empathetic. I’m not even saying this is a fault, I’d rather they fail on the side of empathy than succeed violently.

Very few people want to be homeless. The alternatives offered to them just somehow manage to be even worse than homelessness.

They don’t want to be homeless but they don’t want to put up with free housing drug free rules so they prefer to stay on the streets where they can keep using.

The problem is one of the alternatives they consider worse than homelessness is a life without opioids.

I had cousin who was homeless in San Diego. Over the years she came into money a couple times, either from family members or through inheritance. Instead of getting a place to live she figured drugs were a better use for that money. We tried everything to get her off the street, and nothing worked. She wouldn't even stay at a shelter. Because she had no intention of giving up the drugs.

The problem is money, but at a different level. When you deal with the homeless it's too late. That money must be spent before someone becomes homeless, on welfare: unemployment benefits, accessible healthcare and housing. A minor cut taken care of immediately is nothing, but let it turn into gangrene and you won't be able to fix it at all.

Even benefits etc are too late. The money should be spent on providing hope for people. It's 45 years of neoliberalism that we are reaping.

> The money should be spent on providing hope for people.

How do you suggest that would work? Obviously you can’t just buy hope, so could you provide some specific ideas?

Yes, develop an economy that is not run for rent seekers. Provide a job guarantee so everyone can work at a wage floor. Build housing stock that is actually affordable and desirable for anyone on a normal wage. Make sure healthcare is affordable and available universally. Provide schools that are good regardless of where you live or what you can afford. Those things would be a start.

AFAIK also SF was long known as "hobo capital", meaning many homeless or drifting people just ended up there. So it's much more complex than that, since many of the homeless are not even locals.

Because they're forced to burn dollars to solve a problem that was created upstream for the want of pennies.

I think around 1986 Reagan cut the federal funding to the facilities that would house the mentally ill. This created the homeless situation in the USA. I remember the term homeless as newly formed at that time and remember the population exploding as I went through college in center city Philadelphia.

We've had homeless people forever (although less). I think we used "hobo", or "tramp" back in the 1960s.

There was always a population that preferred living on the margins of society. Hobo’s and tramps are different than the mentally ill and they were called hobos and tramps. My grandmother used to trade food for labor of these people as they passed through.

The homeless were people that could not care for themselves or be of use in some way. The grey area might be junkies.

Some good source material:

https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/did-ronald-reagan-...

The homeless situation as we know it had multiple causes in the 80s and prior. Part of it was Reagan-era policies wanting to save money, but the other half (which in my view would have probably still "achieved" the same end result) was activists who argued that involuntary institutionalization violated the rights of those who were committed. "The Left" and "The Right" were full partners in dismantling what we had. In my opinion, both were too stupid to realize the consequences of just deleting what existed without having a realistic plan for how to deal with those people. It's like if you realized your water heater was consuming $30 worth of electricity every month so you just turn the breaker off and say "We saved $30 and improved our climate footprint" but now everyone has to take cold showers forever and the dishes don't get properly cleaned.

SF is one of the highest cost of living cities in the US. I'm guessing housing and utilities is going to chew up the majority of that $100K, before you even consider medical and mental health visits and transportation to and from those visits, and there is likely tons of resistance from surrounding localities to allowing the City to relocate those they are helping to suburbs where they might find cheaper and/or more accessible housing, food costs, improved access to healthcare, etc.

Anti-social people as a group is a larger population than just the homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts, though these subsets are obviously a significant portion. The superset includes people who are genuinely anti-social in their nature, may be nominally employed, have a mailing address, and a place to sleep at night. These are the people we actually surrendered to when we changed enforcement priorities in major US cities to, ostensibly, have some grace and compassion toward the subset of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts. This is a demonstrably true statement. For me, and many like me, I know it's true because I can do something like "walk around in a neighborhood from my youth" or "visit a downtown corridor I used to frequent as a young adult" and simply observe the difference between the then and now. It's not always about the homeless, and the oft tiring debate around what to do about them. In many US cities, larceny is de facto legal as long as you are stealing goods valued under a certain amount. This is what people are talking about when they use the word "surrender".

I dunno, this could be it but living in rural Ireland showed how many obnoxious teenagers will completely destroy a playground just for kicks. I'm sure a public toilet would fall prey to the same impulse.

It's not just homeless, mentally ill or drug addicts.

In Europe it's frequently teenagers (even those whom parents provide good lives), football fans, drunk people, etc.

Some people are antisocial and destroy public stuff just for laughs, not because they feel resentment towards society.

And sometimes it's not even active destruction, just neglect. Public use amenities are subject to large amounts of wear-and-tear. Sometimes a thing just breaks, from someone being careless or not knowing how to operate it. You have to have the wherewithal for follow-through with upkeep.

One day a bridge collapsed, and no one came to fix it.

This is how an empire dies. One toilet/park/swing at a time.

  About a half a dozen who were nearby when the bridge collapsed, and, of those, only two actually missed seeing it happen. *Everyone* heard it, though: a great roaring waterfall of concrete and steel that echoed across the derelict plains for minutes and miles. The local folk would have told you that it was the river flooding a month earlier what had done it; that, and the heat of that summer havign roasted the old tarmac to pieces. But that wouldn't have been the truth; not entirely. Their hindsight failed to reach past a few preceding seasons, the road's slow degradation after years of use and somewhat fewer years of maintenance as far beyond the horizon as the sea. The columns that supported the span, plunging deep into the river below it, had had great, sweeping cracks for as long as the youth who periodically swam out to tag them could remember. The chain link fence that ran along the bridge's sides had rusted through to a twisted ragged heap even before then.

  The river the bridge had spanned was the _____, and the bridge itself - part of an interstate, from back when there had been states - had linked the northern and southern portions of Jefferson County (which still existed). Thankfully, no one was on it when it finally gave up the ghost. (For a few days, the Hughes of just south of the old rails were worried for their son, Kurt, who had failed to return home that evening; but he eventually turned up a week later, having spent the time with his girlfriend.)

  The loss of the ancient connector meant 50 miles extra travel for anyone who wanted to get from Dodge to Shelley, already a 70-mile trek. With gas so hard to come by, that was no small thing. Rebuilding it would have been ideal, but the fact was that there was no one around who could possibly manage such a project; most of that expertise was locked up in Atlanta, New York-Jersey, Charlotte, and St. Louis, and not one of the territories so mentioned was on good terms with small, flyover, Sep-sympathizing Jefferson County. Besides that, there were scant funds for construction equipment and materials anyway; the curse of Jefferson's self-sufficiency knocking unwelcome on the doors of Jeffersonian hearts more often than any stranger. The bridge would not be rebuilt. So, after the commotion of the actual collapse had died down, and the locals had ceased stopping by to gaze at the ruins and shake their heads and scowl, the structure, half-submerged stone monolith, lay placid and abandoned.

  None of this is really important, except for the part about the 50-mile detour. That... that is actually very important.

---

  The Biker learned of the bridge's collapse well before reaching Jefferson County. For all that had broken down from neglect or sabotage or accident in this land over the years, it seemed that the grapevine was as resilient as ever. The proprietor of a public house - the one he'd stopped in at when it came time to transfer some of his precious fuel from an emergency tank to the hot rod proper - was the bearer of the bad news. He'd thanked her, pulled out the Handspring loaded with a bootleg map app, and started searching for a new route. This one wouldn't do, it was likely to be more of a still-glowing crater than a road; and that one, that one ran right through hardcore Sep territory. And this one... No, he'd definitely run out of fuel. ...Maybe the second, again? If he could be quick, go at the right time of day... Too risky, his common sense told him. Nonsense, said the impulsive part that had gotten him out of (and, admittedly, into) many a hairy situation. T could outrun any trouble he might find. And he wouldn't find any, because he would be very, very careful. 'You don't got a choice, bub. Gas isn't cheap OR plentiful.' 

  "Shit."

  He hit the Handspring's power button and gingerly slid it back into his leather side saddle, and delayed his oncoming foolishness by taking the moment to glance around like he was looking for someone who was looking for him. Other than the pub, a converted vinyl-sided colonial, there was nothing but the coiled curves of cracked suburban roads and sidewalks; the mounded plots that lay along them, where the foundations of dozens of long-dismantled domiciles had once stood; and each building's replacements, bunches of grass and scrub, waving occasionally in the odd and rare breeze, which were staking out their own homesteads.

What book is this from? I would like to read it.

The one that might get written if I ever figure out what it's about. (I truly appreciate the inadvertent encouragement.)

I can pass along some of the inspiration, at least:

https://playlists.at/youtube/embed/?playlist=FdW1CjbCNxw%2CS...

You have a talent for engaging writing. Keep it up.

I wanted to add I searched online for the text to see where I could find/read the rest :) So yes, keep it up.

Over here where I live(UK) it's neither the homeless nor mentally ill people, it's groups of teenagers who have literally nothing else to do and they will destroy every single piece of public infrastructure that isn't solid metal and welded down. Even keep them out of children play parks is a challenge the local police can't manage effectively, I love finding that every single swing and seesaw has been ruined because of bored teenagers.

Whatever other issues they may have, they are overwhelmingly mentally ill, largely schizophrenic, and the surrender in the US happened just outside your fifty-year window when the Supreme Court decided that it should be much harder to institutionalize someone against their will. The timing was similar in the UK, from what I have read. Don’t know about the EU.

The problem with severe schizophrenics is that they don’t like and won’t take their meds if left to their own devices [EDIT: regardless of how much social support you provide, even though we certainly didn’t provide enough]. Institutions are in no way perfect, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not a documentary.

The causation arrow isn't unidirectional, though. Mental illness causes some homelessness, particularly often because in the US healthcare system medications are expensive and can lead to bankruptcy. (And it is certainly not the only path to bankruptcy in the US either.) But more and more studies are showing that the biggest problem with homelessness in the US is that it causes mental illness. (Same thing is being found with drug addictions: some cause bankruptcy and then homelessness, but to cope with homelessness many find new addictions after becoming homeless.)

Most homeless shelters are run by religious charities. The majority of them treat homelessness as a sin, either by intentional policy or accidents of attitude. These "charities" often require a lot of work to keep being allowed to use their housing at their shelter from regular job hunting to regularly attending worship sessions to "zero tolerance" policies on everything from curse words to keeping private possessions to having pets to sometimes taking/keeping necessary medication. It's hard to keep your mental health in good shape when the groups that are housing you in the worst weather are berating you for being terrible sinners and treating you like prisoners.

Outside of shelters the most common interactions between homeless people and the cities around them are interactions with cops, who very rarely have mental health training or social work experience, and treat homeless people like criminals because their job is sometimes to treat everybody as would be criminals.

You ever really talk to a homeless person? The ones that really survive become very organized. They have a list of shelters memorized, which months they prefer to be at each one, what things they need to fake about themselves they need to do to survive in that shelter for a few weeks, how much "rent" they need to raise before they get there (some shelters often cost pennies per day just to show that the homeless person is "working" somehow; some homeless panhandle just to afford shelters), and exactly how long they can stay before they inevitably get kicked out (most shelters are "short term", intentionally). Just listening to all the rules and regulations and requirements makes me think I would go schizophrenic dealing with that world. It sounds like being stuck in a middle school that never ends, if that middle school's "classrooms" were all in entirely different parts of a city and all had deeply different rules. I can easily see why homelessness often causes mental illness in the US.

Institutions are close to the right answer, but for an entirely different reason than you assert. We do need better secular institutions (in the endowed place of learning sense, not the mental hospital sense) with mental health as one goal among several such as long-term support in charge of dealing with the homeless. The numbers keep showing that the greatest fix we've found for homelessness is making sure that everyone has a home where they feel safe and private and don't have to do anything to "earn" much less keep that home.

Right, so, what do you do about the guy who smears feces on the walls and won't take his meds? Because that guy is the one who makes public spaces unlivable. Including places like SRO hotels that actually could provide people with affordable living spaces.

That's the guy who should be institutionalised, obviously?

Yeah, except that because the Warren Court was so incredibly arrogant, it's almost impossible to institutionalize anyone against their will in the US unless you go through all the process of setting up guardianship.

This (straw) man scenario feels like a proximate cause versus root cause situation to me. You've managed to establish a relatively strong proximate cause (or so it seems) as "won't take his meds". Where did he get the meds he was supposed to take? How is he paying for them? Was he given the meds in a place of safety and security enough to have reason to trust the meds might help?

If you were given strange meds that you don't understand anything about by someone who wasn't your personal doctor in a situation that feels like a prison out of your control, would you take them?

That's equally a straw man question, but a useful one to maybe establish empathy for the situation that homeless "guy" might have found himself in.

That's also assuming that is the correct proximate cause. As far as I know science has not yet found exactly a "don't use excrement as spray paint" drug. There are people that will do that which don't need meds and there are people that will do that even on most anti-psychotic meds.

But let's talk about some of the root cause of it all: If you find yourself in a world that you cannot control, that won't let you use any bathroom without buying a coffee/being a customer, that doesn't want you to exist, that says you are only as valuable as the property that you own but then won't allow you any longer to own any property due to some bad luck or misfortune, at that point "the only spray paint I have to send a message about how much this world sucks" might seem pretty clear.

I find it easy to have sympathy with that sort of (straw) man, because there is a logic to it. It's not necessarily a psychotic break. At least, not necessarily at first a psychotic break.

What would I personally do to prevent that? I'd try to prevent people from being homeless in the first place. I'd try to get people mental health resources sooner ahead of crises rather than trying it do it in the middle of a different one (bankruptcy/homelessness). Which is the same as I suggested statistically seems to be the only thing that works: give people private houses with locks and keys and help them feel safe and secure in them, with a sense of ownership and privacy, and with no need to "earn" it or "rent" to keep it. Maybe it doesn't stop the person from covering "their own" walls in feces until they feel safe and secure enough (and that's still a public health problem in the meantime) to try an antipsychotic med that they need to take. But as far as I'm aware no one wants to take or trust an antipsychotic medication if they don't at first feel like they live in a safe enough or secure enough place.

Which again also circles back to "institutions are almost the correct approach, but for the wrong reasons" I mentioned before. A place with mental health resources seems to be an important part of that, still, but I don't think you can address mental health problems in a prison, especially in a society that values private property and private spaces, without first addressing the problems around homeless not having access to private property and private spaces.

But yeah, that's mostly just my opinion on the subject based on statistics and studies that I've read. You don't have to take my word on it. One archived secondary source (with additional links): https://academicweb.nd.edu/~rwilliam/ndonly/readings/SocProb...

lol suuure it does. I totally believe that becoming homeless causes people to stand on sidewalks jabbering obscenities and smearing shit all over the place.

Why the fuck are we so soft on these gutter trash in this country.

They are humans and American citizens. They deserve our compassion.

They just don’t deserve to destroy our public places.

> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them.

Or a consistent race-based or immigrant underclass caste. A lot of countries have the blessing of not having a large population whom they can dismiss the condition of based on visual cues. They just moved from feudalism to universal humanism in one generation.

Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. Somehow the west never caught up. Still having that debate, still trying to justify why their great-grandpas killed those people. China left Mao behind; and the US is still praying to slaveholders and mocking slaves' children, while eating their inheritance.

> It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.

The west were slavers. They literally auctioned off women to have sex with (the "fancy trade") and put children (sometimes their own) into the fields for life. When some got the morality to be disgusted by that, it resulted in bloody wars (I would even include the wars Germany really started because it lost the colony race.) Their civil society was rife with sundown towns, and in Europe actual death factories were designed to murder civilians.

The west is run by degenerates and venerates degenerates. Until it faces that properly, it will never be safe. China did that.

> the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations

It's "altar," and the cliché usually refers to wasted efforts to preserve something (generally an abstract ideal.) Nobody is trying to preserve "antisocial populations." They're usually trying to dispose of the old ones after using them up, and to get new ones in who still can't vote. Ironically, the "antisocial populations" are also the ones who clean the toilets.

>Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish.

I remember China being pretty racist. A lot of people visiting got a clear message. Not aggressively but quite clear.

>The west were slavers.

Who sold them the slaves? Did Europeans go hunt for slaves or did they buy them? Who did they buy them from?

Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.

> Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.

The reason that Africa is in a poor state of affairs is because of rampant colonization and pillaging by European settlers, of which enslavement was a byproduct. In your alternate universe where slavery never happened, Ethiopia and Mali would be wealthy empires.

You are moving the goalpost and just make up stuff. Plenty of time to ... do anything, yet nothing has really been done there. If they are so great they should have been able to defend themselves. If you want to keep the discussion real and objective, feelings aside.

I am also not trying to excuse past behaviors or anything of the sorts. It was what it was and we always strive to do better when we know better. But that being said, systems are built around what is functional considering everything that can happen. When you account for everything to insure your safety and survival, it seems to work out like it did. On all sides.

And again, these interactions are never one way, longer term there's benefits to both sides, the local country, and descendants of all slaves and slave owners.

And just as an aside, I could very well argue most of us are still slaves today, but with clearly way better conditions and freedom of movement. But if you don't toil away daily, 5 days a week, you risk medical issues or lack of shelter, kind of like the homeless discussion in this thread. In some cases even death.

So putting what a few rich people from hundreds of years ago did, on me, a regular European folk, is shortsighted or even evil. I had nothing to do with any of it, my ancestors were peasants. And the same is valid for most people OP is referring to when saying "europeans". It's pure nonsense.

Reading about the history and effects will help clarify some of your confusion.

The Mali Empire peaked around 150 years before Christopher Columbus "discovers" the Americas, and it finally collapses in 1599, finished off by Morocco. The Transatlantic Slave Trade doesn't really kick into gear until the mid-17th centuries, after the Mali Empire is no longer around.

If you wanted a better example, you might have picked, say, Benin. That you use Mali as an example of an empire screwed by Europeans in Africa suggests to me a general poverty of knowledge about any pre-colonial African history.

Weren't both the Benin and Mali empires based on conquest, exploitation, and slavery?

Benin is probably the most well known of the slaver kingdoms of the slave coast, although Benin was around for much longer than just the peak slaving period.

Mali Empire was primarily driven by its control of the trans-Saharan trade routes, at least the southern end of them, which allowed it to profit immensely from the gold and salt trades.

>The reason that Africa is in a poor state of affairs is because of rampant colonization and pillaging by European settlers, of which enslavement was a byproduct.

The colonization mostly happened after slavery.

>Mali would be wealthy empires.

Slavery was a foundational economic and social pillar of the mali empire.

Monarchy is based. Cope.

China has a several-millions-big population of slaves today.

It is effectively a Han ethno-state, led by a de-facto king, with many novel forms of discrimination normalized into the culture.

Thank you, this was hilarious

I don’t think we should put the homeless in forcible shelters like they do in east Asia.

> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there

I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.

In Japan, I've seen attendants looking for some payment to use bathrooms in hotels.

Where? 11 years living in Japan and I've never seen this once, and never heard it from friends or family.

It was in Tokyo. Couldn't tell you the specific hotel. But it had our event coordinator livid and she simply ignored them.

Not that I don't believe you, but don't take that to be a common occurrence in Japan at all. By and large, Japan is a safe haven of clean and comfortable public restrooms. There are always exceptions, of course.

Oh, I don't think it is--haven't lived there but have spent some time for conferences and surrounding time. However, just pointing out, it's not unheard of.

Kind of a loose interpretation of "hotel" - but on Mt. Fuji the huts charge to use toilets unless you're a guest. Not unreasonable, though, given the amount of people coming through and the lack of plumbing. And the last time I was there, most of the huts still worked on the honor system, with a little box at the toilet entrance to leave payment.

I think you just stumbled upon a one-off. I've lived here my entire adult life and never encountered this.

I am ok with paying for public toilets if they are being kept clean.

In every part of Thailand I've been to outside BKK, there's a gas station almost every few kilometers on every major road. Almost every gas station has a public restroom that's open 24/7, unattended. The ones that don't have a public restroom are typically right next to a string of restaurants that have a restroom you can use during the day for free if you ask.

That's also true of the US.

For the most part, yes, but I've gone much longer stretches without seeing a gas station in the US. To be fair, there's also no point in building gas stations at regular intervals in the desert or the many other long stretches of nothing across much of the country.

I've seen people shit in the jungle because what you describe has only been the case near Bangkok and Chiang Mai for me.

Just because they smile when you ask a random restaurant for using the toilet does not actually mean they are happy when people do.

I've driven from Mukdahan to Kanchanaburi to Trang provinces so my experience is not centered around the major cities at all. I don't know what poor luck or exotic adventures you may have had, but I never once struggled to find a bathroom.

> China

> toilets are... clean

Okay I'm going to have to say that this _really_ depends on where you are. Sometimes, yes, especially newer buildings, but man I have seen some horrors there in the past few years when it comes to bathrooms in terms of cleanliness and smell (the frequent smoking in a lot of bathrooms doesn't help). This is coming from someone primarily experiencing Canadian and American bathrooms, for reference, and a lot of those are pretty nasty. I think it's getting better at least...

Just to be clear though I agree generally, at least from my experience with East Asia. Hong Kong often has really good bathrooms now IMO (I feel like it improved a lot between 2018 to 2023?). Japan is also really good from my experience (fancy-ass bidets). Taiwan was fine too from my recollection.

> _really_ depends on where you are

That kinda applies to anywhere in the world. On the average, I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.

And much more accessible as well. Free public toilets literally everywhere. All over the city, in every shopping center, in every coffee shop. And you don't need to buy a coffee and trash it to use them.

> I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.

That definitely tracks. LA has a massive unhoused person issue, many of whom with severe mental disorders. You feel a lot that in the commons, especially as you get near DTLA. New York is shabby and dirty in general. More so than a big city usually is. And it's not really a charming shabbiness from an extreme subtropical climate as you get in Taiwan.

The relationship China has with its tier 1 cities is more similar to other Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, than it is to the US.

Chinese first tier cities aren't accessible, you can't even live there as a country bumpkin.

The hukou reforms in May were a good first step, but for now, you're right.

There are multiple forms of "accessible". For someone impaired and unable to drive, the Chinese cities win hands-down because transportation is a non-issue.

Small nitpicky correction, but in China, city tiers are designated by policy and generally correlate to the quality of life for the middle class there. The US doesn't have a tier system. If it did, it wouldn't make much sense because the quality of life in American suburbs and exurbs is generally better than the most developed cities (unless you're rich, of course).

Free, clean toilets are everywhere in America, just not in the dense city centers (walkable, transit-oriented, mid-rise or higher) that people tend to visit on vacation. I'd estimate only 10-15% of Americans live in these city centers, whereas in China it's probably closer to 50%. With the raw numbers, this difference shouldn't be underestimated.

> not in the dense city centers

aka exactly the place people need them regardless of which country

In the boonies it's much more acceptable to go in the bush in either country as well

As much as a dislike the suburbs, they aren't "the boonies" and it won't be acceptable at all to go in the bush there.

Unfun fact: in Bogotá, it seems to be quite acceptable to piss in the bush everywhere, even in the centro histórico.

> in China, city tiers are designated by policy and generally correlate to the quality of life for the middle class there

What are you basing this on? China does not have a "tier" system for its cities, and certainly not one based on "the quality of life for the middle class there".

The worst toilet I ever saw was in China, but at 5000 meters in Sichuan, it was two slippery two by fours that you had to straddle on over a big open pit (don't slip or lose balance!).

That was such an awesome trip circa 2005.

Well the worst one I ever saw was in New York City, of all places.

My favorite was a place in Chinatown with a curtain for privacy. Outside a couple of guys where killing a seemingly limitless collection of lives chickens.

All of the public bathrooms I’ve been to in NYC were decent, the worst I saw was in Florida. Barely hanging together.

This one was incredibly nasty, and smelly (mostly from piss, I should say). In Brooklyn, if I remember correctly, with the Manhattan skyline in view. It was a public restroom, and I was part of walking tour group.

Yeah, that sounds about like the one I ran into in Florida. It was on a day walk on the way to St. Petersburg, and the heat just made it all worse. 0/10, not enough water, terrible place. Let alone the pills on the ground.

> 5000 meters in Sichuan

Pretty sure you were in Tibetan areas at those altitudes, a large part of Sichuan is actually Tibetan.

Yep, somewhere between Chengdu and Siguniang (4 sisters) if I remember correctly (it could have been on a later leg on to daocheng, but I think it was really early in our trip). You get into Tibetan areas very quickly if you go west from Chengdu, if you are looking for some interesting touring in China, you could do a lot worse than that area. Today the roads are much better and you avoid really high pass driving with lots of tunnels.

Weird. When I was living in Beijing, I made a mental map of all my bathroom choices when I wasn't at a luxury shopping mall, because they just weren't that convenient and available. This includes squats, which I included since sit down toilets were often hogged by some guy on the phone doing a long smoking session (squats never were, which is great when you absolutely need to go!).

But this was in the time when Xi had just taken office, so it is probably better now. I didn't see any issues on my trip to Chengdu this summer. I have a lot bigger problems in downtown Seattle today, which is just really bad (either the toilets don't exist, or there is some homeless guy doing drugs in the only stall they have). Sigh.

"EU" is too broad of a term to describe cultural/social/political norms such as public toilets. There are places in the EU with fairly decent toilets, and others with almost none. In some you have to pay in many public toilets, in others they are free. The best bet in most places are public buildings such as libraries. And very often cafes etc allow you use a toilet, esp if you have health reasons and ask them nicely, though ymmv. The biggest issue as others said is vandalism, so in (richer) countries where public toilets are cleaned more often the toilets are much better.

Cafes/restaurants are required by law to provide toilets to customers, afaik

Is the keyword customers though? In other words you’ve got to spend money to use the toilet?

In America I can walk in to a restaurant, even a nicer one and ask to use the bathroom and very likely would be shown strait to it. It’s not 100% of the time everywhere, especially places like Times Square, but I’d say that the norm is no spend required.

Huh. I encounter "customers only" signs quite frequently in the US, as well as bathrooms that require codes or keys.

They’re not uncommon but in my experience you tend to find them more in tourist areas with high foot traffic or if there are a lot of homeless people or something along those lines.

And even where the signs and procedures exist, often the rules are not enforced... at least, not against people who appear to plausibly be customers.

If you're a well groomed adult and walk up to the counter at a coffee shop and ask for the code, they'll usually just give it to you no questions asked.

The selective enforcement is the point, because they use these policies to keep away the "types" of people they don't want in the businesses (i.e. unhoused people, teens, etc).

> but I’d say that the norm is no spend required.

Obviously can't speak for the entire country of Spain, but that tends to be true here too. The more touristic places, especially closer to the beaches, tend to have "Toilets for customers only" signs though, which is kind of understandable as people start using them as changing rooms otherwise, and get overrun with tourists not really caring about how they leave things.

This is my impression also, there is usually explicit "only customers" where there are genuine problems (overtouristic etc) or where the boss is just weird (even though you may be still told off even without a only-customers sign in some cases). I would say most of the time, under normal circumstances, there is no issue.

Even then, I cannot imagine somebody saying no when telling them "I have a health issue and need to use a toilet", in most cases.

> "EU" is too broad of a term to describe cultural/social/political norms such as public toilets

This calls for Slavoj Žižek's reflections on toilets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXPyCY7jbs

Although he's of course not talking about the room, but about the fixture.

> Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok

That is an extremely small subset of Thailand. I wouldn’t surprised if high end malls in any western capital city also had good toilets.

Most toilets outside of malls in Thailand were bring your own soap and toilet paper and covered in water from the bum guns.

Where I live in EU, the biggest mall's toilet (single) is paid and not great.

Toilet (also single) at the train station (that sees 500k+ volume per day) is 1.5€, and also not great. At least it takes a card.

Also to add, Thailand is rather unique in that almost 50% of the country population lives in or around Bangkok - https://reliefweb.int/sites/default/files/styles/large/publi...

Yes it sucks. Much worse in Central America than Asia, apparently (many places will let you use the bathroom but they aren't very clean and many lack toilet paper or soap). Most of (non-EU, anyway) Europe is more kind about using facilities than the USA (when the businesses that have them are open, anyway).

There are apps and websites to find restrooms but the free restroom in America is indeed dying. Experiments with things like self-sanitizing enclosed all-inclusive pay toilet stations in outdoor areas in large cities in America almost all ended in them being carted away, broken, since people just seem to break them (for fun or sport, who knows). I guess people expected more for their quarter or fifty cents or a dollar than just emergency facility usage. Pity.

> As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU.

Try Poland. Basically every restaurant needs to have a toilet and every one of those must be made available to passers by, not just customers. They are clean and plentiful.

It's mandated by law. Your country is just one political decision from this luxury.

Yeah I have IBS too. In Iceland once I ran into a gas station to use the toilet. The idiot owner tried to charge me about USD 3 as I came out. I just said I'll fill up gas and be a customer and he backed off. I filled about $0.10 of gas and left.

This has very little to do with public amenities. It has everything to do with toleration of homelessness and drug use. I don't understand why the west tolerates it at all.

I'm genuinely concerned to ask what you're proposing?

Drug use is already unlawful, and the homeless are routinely criminalized for existing - so if that is "tolerate" then what proposals are you trying to promote?

I'm sure he meant removing the profit incentives from the pharmaceutical and housing industries, disentangling cartels like the Sacklers from the politicians they own, in general tolerating the Epstein class

You think we don't tolerate the homeless in the West? Man oh man, some traveling would do you good.

Asylums.

I took my son to Sydney, Australia and we used a public toilet at the main train station and I turned around for 10 seconds and my son had located a syringe and was about to grab it. Some scumbag just left it on top of the syringe bin, probably too stoned to put it in. It was truly horrifying.

The only place I’ve seen worse toilets is USA and Europe. Toilets in Japan are a dream.

China, clean?? Some of the worst toilets, public or private, I've encountered in China. Can't say how Europe compares but I'd rank China a distant last amongst Australia, Vietnam, Japan, America, Canada, and South Korea (there's more countries to fit in there but I'm not going to list them all).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_Revolution_in_China

Yea i've been frequently, and maybe last year being the most recent. There's definitely been a revolution in development but in my opinion public toilets are probably the least revolutionized out of everything in China.

I've been to many of the major cities in China and hubs in-between and I have not seen a single public toilet that is clean. Humid, stinky, wet, stained with shite and urine yes but "clean", no way!8-((

Sorry I've been to China plenty and the toilets aren't clean. I mean it's better than nothing but some of them are nightmare fuel. But, the "privately" owned public toilets are decent, i.e. those in malls and hotels etc. Quite the same story for many Asian countries too.

I was also shocked by the cost incurred if you get out of home diarrhoea in Europe. Might as well buy adult diapers.

I'll never forget my visit to a bathroom at a huge hotpot restaurant in Chongqing. Open stalls with squatty toilets, feces everywhere and a single towel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_Revolution_in_China

Which EU countries do you talk about? Because I've never seen anything like this

Is this some sort of psy-op here against EU, this isn't the first message like this where someone is praising China and accusing EU, as if it's a unitary entity, about being a "horror show". If only we would have some dictators or extremist parties back in power to break up the EU and take our countries back to the good old days. I'm finding it harder and harder to come back to Hn with all of this stuff.

> Is this some sort of psy-op here against EU

No, commonly here on HN it is American commentators who've visited like Italy or Greece or France once, then they extrapolate their experience in a tourist-heavy city, looking/behaving as an American, over the entire continent. Happens almost every day here.

Any comment mentioning EU/Europe here has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Usually it turns out they've visited some countries and the experience is unique for where they visit.

To be fair, the same happens towards the US too, someone visits Montana then assumes a bunch about the entire country. I guess "American visiting country in Europe" is just more common here, given the US bias on this forum usually.

This is a passion topic of mine and I am a German citizen living in Germany. I am absolutely furious ever since I visited Asia. Public restrooms here are rare, mostly broken, disgusting and health hazards in all of Germany no matter where you go. I'd guess that about 15% of accessible toilets outside your home are OK experiences.

Every non-EU citizen should be aware of what to expect in Germany, and even worse in France, Italy or Greece. Shithole is a perfect description - it is just unbelievable how barbarically bad we are at public restrooms in comparison to anything you find across developed Asian countries.

Even beyond just cleanliness, you always have harassing bathroom bouncers in private AND public facilities in Germany, basically acting as highway robbers to steal your money without ever actually cleaning anything. At best they look up from a phone and nod when you pay your urine toll.

The only half usable bathrooms are from corporations like Sanifair which are making a business out of uncontrollable, basic human bodily functions. China doesn't need to invest in psyops against Germany or the EU at all if we are perfectly able to make ourselves look bad in comparison. Just use Occams razor.

And of course the major issue is vandalism and destruction by a huge population of junkies, homeless, aggressive (male) youths etc. on top of anti-social behavior, hegemonially pushed by American individualism ever since WW2. I guess this is the point where you can accuse me of injecting ideas that could originate from Chinese psyops? In the end I want a society that cares for its fellow citizens.

Not only have many of the Americans here extensively traveled Europe and/or lived there (myself included), but there are loads of Europeans on HN! Including all over this thread talking about their own experiences in their own countries!

Europe is Shcrodiger's continent. Nobody knows exactly what countries/regions norms are to be dishonestly projected across all of it until after you know what lie you're trying to peddle on the American internet.

Maybe you'll make it out to all be like the nordics. Maybe you'll make it all out to be like Sicily, or Croatia. Whatever lie you have, Europe has something to back you up, lol.

I'm exaggerating (less than I want to be) but not joking here.

This is even true of Americans in America!

Someone from bumbfuck nowhere visits one big city and generalizes their experience, good or bad.

Or how all of HN is constantly convinced that the entire US is only SV or NYC, which is why they continually praise how Uber broke the "Taxi Cartel" that didn't exist anywhere else.

Or how much of the country only knows of cities from the propaganda they were fed by Fox News, which is why my brother told my mom that Portland Maine was a war zone back during the BLM marches, because 20 kids were laying down in front of the police department, which was a nothing burger and cops weren't even bothered, more like amused.

But the city is somehow not a warzone when ICE abducts 100 people off the street and kills at least one.

Sure, it's a psy-op. ONLY POSITIVE EU OPINIONS ARE PERMITTED! :))

I lived 12 years in China and now 1.5 in EU. Traveled both fairly extensively. The above is just my experience.

We left China in big part due to authoritarian politics. But if what's happening in EU (and US? never been there tho) is "democracy" then maybe we need to rethink.

I like many things in EU, and I dislike many things as well. At least here I'm not worried for my safety when I discuss it online, aside from some people calling it a psy-op or whatever.

Can you point at specific experiences?

In the EU countries I have visited you can ask most coffee shop and restaurants to use their toilet without any issue. In the most touristy places you are supposed to buy something, which usually is a coffee or a small bottle of water.

If it's a psyop it's only on the side that China might be somehow better, cause frankly neither my home country nor any others I've visited throughout the EU (and by now that's over half of them) are particularly good in this aspect. Like gas stations now require you to scan your bill to access the toilet, and it's still a toss up if it'll be clean or not, it's practically normal for restaurants to have "toilets for guests only" signs. Like how far can we fucking sink in this regard, it does not cost an euro of water, paper and cleaning work per person visit to run a toilet, it's borderline extortion just because they know people have nowhere else to go.

The only thing propping it up is that unlike a hundred years ago, people generally now have the common decency to not piss everywhere, which I think would reverse this idiocy rather quickly.

> And EU is a freaking horror show. In many public toilets there's a used syringe compartment as well. Truly a 5-star service.

What does that mean ? There are massive differences in EU between not only countries but even also regions of one country. How can you say that toilets are horrendous in 27 different countries with 27 different cultures ?

edit : and disclaimer, I live in France and I'm not proud of our public toilets because we are clearly amongst the bad ones (even if again it really depends on where you go, that's still too random to be acceptable) but my experience have been pretty positive in most other EU countries I visited.

He meant Brussels, that's where he visited.

I mean NL is like, there are only really present at train stations, cost money to use, and they look pretty bad. I will say though that “used syringes compartment” is good, actually.

Warsaw and Posen were quite similar to NL by the time I left — paid toilets that weren’t all that great and sometimes outright gross. I’ve also been to Berlin and I wouldn’t call the experience amazing either. I don’t remember using public toilets in Serbia, Switzerland or Spain when I was there.

But so far European track record is not great. To the point where I’m a bit pleasantly surprised other places actually do this well.

At least you have some. I've seen them. Public restrooms aren't a thing in the US, except for some beaches and parks. We don't even have trashcans at intersections besides bus stops. Speaking for LA, Miami, Charlotte and Las Vegas. Perhaps other municipalities do.

Clean toilets? In China?!

You must've been to a different China than me. I've been there several times and the toilets are always atrocious.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan always had the cleanest ones.

Well I lived there for 12 years, so yeah, might've been a "different China".

EU(or US) can't have public toilets because it's gonna get vandalized. For fun.

One thing that perplexed me endlessly during my youth living in Sweden was seeing drunk teenagers go around vandalize things for... Fun. Breaking the glass at the buss station (designed to shatter in to million pieces so you don't hurt yourself), friends enjoying graffiti, littering, throwing beer bottles on the street for fun....

During public school lunch (I only heard my friends doing it) they had "meatball war" throwing meatball at each other for fun. Justification was that school lunch taste shit so it's ok to throw food. Mind you all this was in the district with highest median earning in the entire country, not a ghetto.

Same for toilet. Just why did you need to rip off that toilet lid?

Collective ownership and responsibility is taught. In most Asian countries kids are often tasked to clean their own classroom. If someone then just destroys things for fun everyone suffers. EU/US just think that's dumb thing to teach because "eww collectivism" and even the weird conservative people going on about rules usually don't even want that.

So you have a society where race to the bottom is inevitable when it comes to caring for public utilities. "privatized profit(fun) , socialized loss" teaching starts even before economics class

How is that not connected to police enforcement, though? In Europe and now the US the new generations are anti-police, anti-enforcement and generally consider authority and rules to be proof of an unjust society (X group is N percent more likely to receive a criminal summons when ..).

In the US in slow motion we could see a world in which you could go to a big chain pharmacy and retrieve your own toothpaste and shampoo. Now it's considered entirely normal to put these behind plexiglass, and to hire a security guard to stand by the door, but the guard isn't legally allowed to stop anyone or engage in any physical altercation. Because homelessness, because mental illness, because drug addiction, etc are not to be 'criminalized.'

In NYC a decree stopped the police from issuing summonses for not paying the subway fare. Because it was said to be racist. Today, tons of people, especially normal professionals - happily do not pay the fare, while the system is said to be in financial deficit.

Yet here we're discussing comparisons with Asian cultures and how they are more respectful of public space.

So, my friends, is it a cultural difference, a legal enforcement difference, or an inevitable consequence of injustice? I'm dying to understand because it's at the crux of the political divide, and I'm seeing cities getting worse in front of my eyes.

Enforcement is an external impetus. Internal impetus are better to cultivate. I can't answer how cultures tend to differ here from my limited vantage point, so what I'm really saying is respect doesn't come by itself typically.

> Enforcement is an external impetus. Internal impetus are better to cultivate.

Internal impetus cannot be cultivated if the youth do not want or desire to be taught cultivation.

Ish. Spare the rod, spoil the child type approaches haven't seemed to hold true in my experience.

I cannot speak for the US, but having been in Europe and Asian countries like Japan and Korea, the simplest explanation is the difference in tolerance for petty crime, vandalism and litter. Is related to the broken window theory.

The thing is that European cities have always been kinda dirty and crime infested, and it has little to do with American culture war. I do not have an explanation for this, because you will need dig deep into history for that, but the good news is that things are overall improving. Overall crime is overall trending down. For example, the inner city of Amsterdam used to be full of junkies and now that has been almost completely cleaned up. And football Hooligans used to be a much bigger problem than they are now.

That's right. We seem to have "allowed" or tolerated petty crime in most Europe. When I tell my foreign friends what kind of stuff happens in my area they always extrapolate and tell me I live in "8 mile". But it's not the case, almost everywhere in Europe has property crime (pickpocketing and burglaries), bigger stuff however is very rare.

It's funny to read HN comments where people can sort of describe the problems but can't really describe the problems

Then please, do everyone a favor and describe the problem.

Unchecked immigration, lax policing.

Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them.

>the guard isn't legally allowed to stop anyone or engage in any physical altercation

This is false. In California the guard can use non-deadly force to detain a suspected shoplifter. Retailers may have a company policy telling guards and employees not to physically confront shoplifters, because that introduces escalation risk, litigation risk, and risk of injury. It’s simply cheaper to let the item go, in many cases. I’ve read that Target will strategically do this until a person steals enough that it becomes a felony, and then release the hounds.

> In NYC a decree stopped the police from issuing summonses for not paying the subway fare. Because it was said to be racist. Today, tons of people, especially normal professionals - happily do not pay the fare, while the system is said to be in financial deficit.

I’m not sure where you get your information from, but I suggest you reconsider your sources, because this is also false (not the deficit, but a decree stopping police from issuing summons): https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/excel/analysis_and...

I assume you are referring to a 2018 policy reform. Your concerns are debunked here: https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Fare-...

NYC ended up spending $1,440 per dollar in fares recovered on stopping fare jumpers, which is probably why the decree came about in the first place. Is there a particular reason why you think setting gargantuan amounts of money on fire over trivial offenses makes sense?

Per dollar recovered or per future fare-jumped dollar prevented?

Edit: This plays into something I observe in most "data-driven" organizations. Having a statistic available about recovery costs makes it easy to shift the conversation toward that statistic, when you actually ought to be asking questions about (in this case) the causal impact of that intervention on the subway's overall profitability, the need for easily available public transit and whether there ought to be a fare in the first place, the public good (or maybe harm -- the point is that we ought to be discussing it one way or the other) done by using fare-jumping collections as a mechanism for training people to be less antisocial in other aspects of their lives, or whether that obscene cost of fare collection is actually a reasonable baseline and should be improved. Your statistic, while interesting, is almost useless when trying to figure out what we should do next, at least by itself, and when paired with human psychology it can be actively harmful.

Per dollar recovered. Paying law enforcement officers overtime and directing police attention away from more significant criminal behavior (as opposed to redesigning turnstiles or pursuing alternative strategies like no-fare systems) is extremely expensive and time-limited in terms of impact.

It does shovel a lot of dollars at law enforcement and let the Adams administration pretend to be tough on crime despite engaging in a lot of it, which was the actual intent.

The sorts of people who turnstile jump are likely to commit further crimes on the public transit system that more directly affect the ordinary people trying to use it legitimately. For this reason I specifically want the police to prioritize arresting and prosecuting turnstile jumpers - it concretely improves the experience of public transit for everyone.

This is the same reason that getting rid of fare-checking is bad - the sorts of people who are kept off the transit system by enforcing a fare, are not people you want to be in an enclosed space with.

Corroboration: crime on BART dropped when the new harder-to-jump fare gates went in.

Because those trivial offences are a nuisance. BART spent millions implementing fare gates which so far, is at a huge loss, but it's dramatically lowered maintenance cost and crime on the transit.

Similarly stores with loss prevention guards are probably losing money, but I'd much rather that than having to click a button to unlock items, etc.

Loss prevention in retail is absolutely tailored to the store, in the US. Essentially, the corporate dept has a bucket of funding and chooses where / how to deploy it. So when you see {insert LP device}, there's metrics to back it up. And specifically, worse metrics than the same chain stores that don't have that device.

The fare gate redesign was cost-neutral; that’s the kind of solutions that should have been on the table, not setting money on fire with cop salaries.

Capitulating to the antisocial persons by just giving up just sends a message to others that this behavior is acceptable. It moves the Overton window. Someone who used to think turnstile hopping was the kind of thing only crooks and low-lifes do sees people doing it more and more, witnesses and hears about how there are no consequences, and can't help but reframe it as more like driving 70 in a 65mph zone -- a harmless thing that "everybody does" and is totally fine. The city has enough money, and after all, Mamdani said he'll make those rich guys pay more! That'll cover my share! Meanwhile transit deteriorates severely.

I much prefer targeting more pressing antisocial behaviors while not excessively wasting public funds, something the Mamdani administration has been doing quite efficiently e.g. with the pied-à-terre tax. You seem angry about that, for some reason.

Not sure how you can justify the pied-a-terre tax by claiming it fights against antisocial behaviors. It just is another funding stream.

Nah, I'm not really angry because I don't live in New York so it's not my problem. But no, I don't respect a politician who is demonstrably economically illiterate.

Great. So MTA raises fares and complains about not being able to meet revenue, causing the state to have to funnel more to it.

Nevermind that the economics of your argument are completely blind to the fact that the funding sources of the MTA and the NYPD are completely different.

More crazy is the downstream effects of putting up your hands and letting crimes go.

All this for what ? Social justice? Here's my counter to that - the subway is a public good, For the People a socialist would say.

So you encourage stealing from The People.

You cannot have police enforcement for petty misdemeanors like those, that's way too expensive. The only means-appropriate correction is social enforcement (i.e. norms and values), but too many people think that society is other peoples' problem. That's one of the downsides of a hyper-individualist society.

+1 Based on my perception of being raised in Germany but have lived in Asia for quite some time this is a deep cultural issue in the west. Concepts such as the German 1968 "Macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht" (break what breaks you), 'civil disobedience' but even "Sabotage" born during the industrial revolution as a workers uprising are all deeply embedded culturally. Not all of them I would like to give up, but it's hard to draw the line.

Finally Vandalism is the worst part of it, but mind you it's named after the Vandals a German tribe after they sacked and looted Rome their oppressors captial.

They say young animals learn survival through playful fights. Maybe western youth learns about freedom through throwing meatballs.

I really don't know but would love to read more about this topic.

Opsec permitting, how long ago was this?

While I'm sure The Youth as a group were never terribly respectful in these countries, social media clout (and the influencer's rise as the only apparently secure profession and for teens the only symbol of a social leadership caste) totally changed the equation regarding motivations. This culminated in the 2021-2022 school year "Devious Licks Challenge", a bathroom destruction tiktok trend which is straight out of Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist.

> EU(or US) can't have public toilets because it's gonna get vandalized. For fun.

Kids vandalize shit in the US for the hell of it.

You'll even see graffiti in really hard to reach places where forget the danger of it, it's hard to even understand how they hell they got up there and could still make something legible (like really tall bridges with nothing to stand on underneath).

Historically that was always part of the bragging rights. The harder to reach, or more risky location, the higher the cred for having achieved it.

It's not collectivism, it's the "no consequences" thing.

"back in my time" in what used to be yugoslavia, it was perfectly acceptable for an adult to slap/hit a kid who caused problem or was destroying stuff, if a dad had to come to school because the kid did something bad, that was a horrible punishment, plus no leaving the room after, no toys, no bike, no outside play, no nothing for some time.

Now? Parents protect their idiot vandal kids, threathen the school with lawyers, even if cops bring home a kid selling like weed and vomiting red wine, the parents will blame everything else except their little sunshine.

Even academically, kids can't read anymore, and we just push them on, no repeating and losing years, no nothing, here's a "2" (passing grade), go to next year, and after a few more pushes, you'll be someone elses problem, illiterate or not.

I remember this “time” in my US classroom where we were all punished with if one person damaged classroom property (or worse, school property) but no one was willing to speak up and tell on the offender.

I have similar stories from our local neighborhoods where another parent might yell at you but the tales of your exploits made it home before you did. And there consequences waiting for you.

It’s a matter of timeline, not country.

By the late 1990s, I started to see said teachers pushing kids along as to 1) not deal with them again, and 2) pressure from district/state to not have as many failing students a.k.a. optimizing for the metric.

Bathrooms aren't always closed because of vandalizing. NYC public schools lacked bathrooms and stall doors -- the various heroin epidemics saw to that. Schools closed boys bathrooms and removed stall doors to discourage drug use.

In 1994 my public HS had ONE boys bathroom with no stall doors across from the lunchroom where a public school guard sat and watched. The girls had one on every floor. Had to take a dump? pray no one was in one of three stalls and put your book bag on your lap. My brother went to Brooklyn Tech and had the same missing stall door issue though had more bathrooms.

That's not the norm across the US (thought it might have been for urban areas).

I went to public high school in the same era in the northern VA suburbs and we had bathrooms available. With doors even. In our 3-building campus, there were at least 6 full sets of bathrooms that I remember (so there were probably more), plus two sets of locker rooms which had toilets.

>-- the various heroin epidemics saw to that.

But hey, it's walkable!

I don't disagree with your points, but have you ever considered it strange that you're unable to relate to why someone would want to do something for fun?

you answer your own perplexity by yourself in the same sentence; they do it for fun. I know this because I was a shithead vandal teenager, and I did it for two reasons , 1) fun at the moment and 2) to impress my peers and sex partners.

I think the frustrations of youth are undersold here, and I think the expectation of "You're born, now conform to being a cog in this machine that you had nothing to do with or necessarily any interest in." is also somewhat fundamentally flawed, even if the kids have nice bathrooms due to their own efforts to shit in.

a society that repairs itself and allows a certain level of vandalism is better, I think. It allows for the rebellious youth to get through these psychological phases without much possibility of a misstep that allows them to throw themselves into incarceration for life, it offers leeway for personal growth, and it doesn't pin them into programs that they hate and wouldn't integrate into, anyway.

Tell me, how does the whole 'kids take care of their own bathrooms' thing work out for bullies?

answer: they love it. They don't have to work. Asia hasn't solved the bullying thing yet even with their perceived perfect unitary social one-ness.

I don't disagree to your points, but Asia (Japan specifically for me, since I had the opportunity to attend both school system) have vandalism and delinquent just the same as America/Europe.

They just showed their delinquency very differently. Some weird form of "honor among thieves/不良/yakuza" deal, which mostly meant they were aggressive, hanged out late (loitering around convenience store asian squatting with a cigarette in their hand) and driving around in loud bikes and fight each other. Breaking public things was a rare overstep.

So I still don't get it no. There are many ways to have "delinquent fun" so to say, so why at one place the same need is put out on public things vs the other place it is taken out on... Each other(?) is a mystery to me.

>Tell me, how does the whole 'kids take care of their own bathrooms' thing work out for bullies?

This is the most predictable counter argument I get when the public responsibility in school in Asia is brought up, and it sounds fair on the surface on it but it is a red herring; bullying exist independent of collectivism or individualism nor collective responsibility or not, and neither address it, and neither is anyone claiming it addresses bullying.

And no bully don't usually love it. Because there's something called a teacher that checks in if everyone is doing their part and if a malicious actor is not, they get reprimanded. This is ofc not perfect and doesn't solve "teachers pet/favoritism" issue, but it does its job of teaching the students that "if everyone collaborate, one can circumvent race to the bottom Nash equilibrium when no one cleans the room." which I would say is a much better systemic approach than "idk individualism, things are shit because we are too lazy to think about responsibilities nor systemic way to uphold some trust in social settings"

"If your system is built on the assumption of every actor acting ideally, that's a broken system."

> have you ever considered it strange that you're unable to relate to why someone would want to do something for fun?

What a bizarre extrapolation. They just don't see why smashing up bus stops is fun. Maybe you can answer, what's fun about it? I don't get it either. I was a teenager once, I don't see why destroying things that are useful for everyone (including you) would be fun.

It's fair game. In short, it reads like, "I don't understand the motivations behind this behavior, and here's what needs to happen to stop it."

If you want to change something, understanding it is a very good first step. Usually it means you're on the path toward finding a cure rather than simply treating symptoms.

Of course understanding is a good first step. However the onus is I think on the antisocial one to explain themselves. Of course I did ask exactly what you suggested, and they didn't reply. So maybe just stopping them without understanding would be ok in this case.

I think the onus is on the one who wants to enact change, but I'm curious how you came to prefer sorting it by sociability.

"the one who wants to enact change" is not really meaningful. They want to change the working bus stop into a smashed bus stop. I want to change the people who smash bus stops into people who don't smash bus stops. I don't think the abstract framing is helping you to think about it (or helping me to understand you).

My feeling about this is very simple. I think the position "I want to smash up public infrastructure to impress my sexual partners" is destructive and immoral. I don't see any reason we should allow it to happen. If someone wants to do that, I think we should punish them. I am not sympathetic to that position at all. Why do you think I should be? That's all I'm asking.

I do think it's closely related to women, because like you say, girls go for runabouts. Girls think the communal farm hippie is romantic, the satan-woshipping metal band member is romantic, the (2000s) kid rock punk trailer trash is romantic. Girls who have looks but are born poor seem to have no choice but encourage it. Murphy's law rules: if it's stupid (breaking windows) but it works (she likes me), it isn't stupid.

I feel like society kinda ran out of rebelliousness with kid rock and then rap culture (late 2000s Jay-Z, Chris Brown). It seems to have dried up. Modern lookmaxxing and gym rat culture, travel vlog, influencers are now the cool kids, van-life and nomadic travel are the new stick-it-to-the-man.

Young people are going to look at Ukraine and realize that flower power and stick-it-to-the-man are utterly bizarre. Who in Ukraine is doing the John Lennon routine? John Lennon's message is totally bizarre now.

> EU/US just think that's dumb thing to teach because "eww collectivism" and even the weird conservative people going on about rules usually don't even want that.

It's interesting to me to call out conservatives here as they are typically the ones touting community responsibilities through social norms. Despite the socialism (non-derogotarily) lean of the left, I would still consider them more individualistic, socially.

The two groups differ in their enforcement of collectivism (socially or legally) not their aversion/inclination to it. We are a social species, after all.

I think you'd find less graffiti in a rural bathroom than a large city bathroom.

> I think you'd find less graffiti in a rural bathroom than a large city bathroom.

IMHO that's purely due to differences in population density.

I'm not sure that matters so much, a toilet can only handle so much traffic. I suspect a wal-mart bathroom sees similar traffic, regardless of location.

Wal-Mart has a direct, strong financial motivation to maintain that public bathroom: Customers that have to leave because they have to go to the toilet will buy less things.

Yup, drive to any town a few miles outside a city and the bathrooms will be nice and clean, drug stores won’t have everything locked up, cafes and gas stations don’t have all their bathrooms locked up with keypads.

Hmmm…remind me again why I should trust ‘team blue’ with running my city?

The US has public toilets.

Yeah I don't get this, there are plentiful public toilets all over the US.

> Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok, that's an absolutely next level experience, clean, smells good, relaxing music. Mmm...

When I traveled to Thailand, I first stopped in Abu Dhabi. The bathrooms in the airport were amazing. I couldn't believe they had stalls that were basically personal bathrooms (whereas in the US, your feet are exposed, and anyone who wants to see you can simply peak through the many cracks, or even throw something on you from above). The bidet thing was a little weird at first, but had no choice but to use it.

Likewise, when I got to Thailand (Bangkok), I could not believe how clean the bathrooms were (with the personal room-style stall as well). These bathrooms were as clean as you'd find them in a clean-freaks home.

When I arrived back in the States (JFK NY), I needed to use the bathroom really bad, but upon entering the restroom... I just couldn't do it. Urine all over the floors and toilets. Even at the entrance. Graffiti everywhere. Absolutely disgusting.

It really changed my perspective. And let's not forget bidets... I'm mind-blown that people in the US use tissue paper to wipe their a*es. Yeah, I've done it for most of my life as well, but after using a bidet in multiple countries, you realize how tissue paper alone isn't effective. It honestly makes me angry that they're not in every public/private bathroom.

Sounds like you live in top 1% area in China. That's def not true that toilets are readily available in China.

As non-chinese citizen, I veered off place I cannot go without the passport, I see crappy areas without toilets everywhere (though I was stopped by police from wondering around).

You only see where you are allowed to see. Rest of those area has no toilet, and people crap/pee everywhere.

In China, you rarely see people defecating or urinating anywhere without proper sanitation facilities, except in the wild.

The "wild" makes up for the 99% of China.

Even in cities, why do I have to take a dump without doors?

Why do I see mom's letting kids take a dump and pee in the streets whiloe they are wearing pants that have no coverage in the bottom area? wtf is that.

---

And out of 100s of comments, how did you spot my comment so quick? and it is the first comment right after you joined? You replied within minutes of my posting,

@TRACK: rykelchen

The "wild" doesn't make 99% of China. I mean, not demographically. Of course you don't have a toilet 100km deep in Himalayas forest, don't be ridiculous. Otherwise, 70% of Chinese people live in urban areas.

Little kids peeing is a bit of a special case.

I dunno, I lived there for 12 years and we still visit often, my extended family is in the "rural" area (which by now also has better infra and roads than half of EU), and they have free public toilet "buildings" every 4-6 blocks.

I mean, sure, if you get into some weird factory blocks or developing area where nobody lives, they don't have it there. Any established residential or commercial area usually will.

Where are these "places I cannot go without the passport"? My understanding is that there are almost none of those left, and its typically very high elevation areas that can be used to image nearby military installations.

Xi Jinping being the Toilet King is funny. Love the idea of toilet empowering decrees.

Is it true that there are a ton of paid toilets in the EU? And are those generally nicer than free ones?

If this could be useful, I've been working on a tool to map public restrooms: throneroom.app. Hope is for parents, blue collar folk, but most importantly the IBS community to have a resource where they can vet bathrooms before visiting. Open to any input if this could be helpful to you!

> And EU is a freaking horror show. In many public toilets there's a used syringe compartment as well. Truly a 5-star service.

There are sharps containers in the bathrooms in my office in the US. It's to support people who have to inject insulin and the like, not injectable narcotics.

But I think they'd be a good idea in places that have drug use problems. I do not want to deal with an accidental needle-stick from some homeless drug-users syringe.

Lack of bathrooms has been called tragedy of the commons in this thread, but it's not the "commons" that are the problem.

The worst 10% of society determine what we can and can't have. The "commons" aren't having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying the bathrooms with lack of... etiquette. The commons are victimized when these things happen and then there's eventually no choice but to shut them down unless there's willingness to crack down on the explicit problematic behavior.

I tried to find a good term for this trend and the best I could do is "defining deviancy down" defined as "the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible."

It's like a behavioral Overton window that grows downwards.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41212064

Exactly. Just need to find time to properly read this.

You're right about who is causing the damage etc. but the 'commons' does not refer to the people; it refers to the shared resource. So a public park is the commons. And when it gets polluted with plastic rubbish etc. because externalities are not internalized that's a tragedy of the commons.

Thanks for both teaching me and not losing the forest for the trees of my point.

The fallacy in "the tragedy of the commons" is that there's something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms the shared resource. At least this is the popular understanding. And I'll add that if we look at shared resources both with more breadth -- e.g. across history and cultures -- and in more depth -- e.g. cross-analysis, they come out looking much more successful than you'd think.

That's not true. As with all game theory payouts, it's not saying that a Nash equilibrium is inevitable, it's saying that to avoid it you need incentives outside the game, it's saying that the incentives of the game itself don't suffice.

In terms of "the tragedy of the commons", that outside incentive is usually public shaming in smaller communities, or rules and laws in larger and more anonymous communities. If you look at shared resources across history and cultures, you usually find communities enforce very strong outside incentives against spoiling the commons instead of just relying on the kindness of strangers.

That isn’t what the tragedy of the commons is. It isn’t about something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms it.

It is about the idea that when there is a limited, shared public resource, individuals making rational self-interested decisions will often lead to a situation which no individual would choose.

That doesn’t mean it always has to end in tragedy, though. It just means you can’t just go fully “laissez faire” and let everyone do whatever they want, and expect the common to be preserved. The only way to protect the common is to take some sort of collective action; pass a law that limits how much an individual can take from the common, or set a quota and allow people to bid, etc.

The collective action doesn’t even always have to be a legislative action; you could create a taboo around using too much of a common, or use social shaming to get people to only use their share.

The point is that you have to take SOME collective action to prevent the tragedy.

More specifically, tragedy of the commons is inevitable in a purely capitalist society. It's a pro-regulation argument.

I've usually encountered it as an argument for privatization.

"The tragedy of the commons" isn't a claim that "the commons universally leads to worse outcomes", but rather "the commons universally leads to worse incentives". The existence of a separate set of contradictory cultural incentives may prevent worse outcomes, but it doesn't change the nature of the incentives created by the commons, nor does it contradict the truth of "the tragedy of the commons", let alone render it fallacious.

You are of course right about what the word "commons" refers to. Still, I want to quibble.

Maybe the definition covers both, but I still think it's worth distinguishing between incentives creating a bad equilibrium and simply antisocial behaviours. When I hear "tragedy of the commons", I think of the former.

A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?

In places where these things were problems with public restrooms, they remain problems without public restrooms.

The 10%'ers are still doing their dastardly things. The remaining 90% of society still has the same messes to clean up (or to willfully ignore).

Nothing has been improved in this process.

Agreed. However it becomes unstable and a massive liability for society to maintain public restrooms.

So yes the 10% fuck it up for everyone unless cracked down on.

How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.

Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible.

Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.

Also: the liability of getting stuck with a needle.

My first job was "stockboy" at Kmart in 1996, at 1996 American minimum wage, and part of the job involved cleaning toilets.

And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin.

But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.

Cleaning up trash, wiping tables, mopping the floor is one thing.

Cleaning up bodily fluids, which likely come from drug users, is a whole other thing.

> which likely come from drug users

OK, come on, you don’t know that. I doubt we have any serious data that bodily fluids in public bathrooms are likely to come from drug users. And if you’re cleaning it up, presumably you have equipment and are not using your tongue, the residual drugs won’t jump on you. Don’t stigmatise hard drug users, many of them (maybe most) were given a rotten hand early on and now want help. Policies such as Portugal’s decriminalisation have shown we can make a bigger difference when we treat those people as people.

Either way, the point of your parent comment is that most people don’t even pick up trash, which is itself a problem.

I do know that. For a time I was GM for a convenience store. I started requiring people to come ask me or the manager on duty for a key to the bathroom, which I started having locked by default.

There was an immediate 90% reduction in bodily fluids outside the toilet bowl and 100% reduction in stolen plumbing (they were taking part of the p-trap for drug use) and in finding discarded paraphernalia. Correlation isn't causation, maybe all the crack heads were still using the bathroom but decided to be civilized, IDK, but keeping the bathroom under literal lock and key was a big benefit.

It was inconvenient for customers, that was true, and I didn't like that aspect, but it was hard getting staff (or even myself) that had the will to hose poop off a bathroom wall.

Which I can tell from your comment you've never done. "presumably you have equipment" Yeah, a hose. A mop and bucket. You're still in close proximity, you still step in it, it still splashes. And nothing prepares you for the smells. And you can never unsee it. I won't even describe the things I saw in the womens bathroom. Way less common for things to go down in there, but when it did... It's wretched work.

The toilets you cleaned in 1996 were no where near as disgusting/dangerous as what the public toilets look like now from fentanyl zombies and meth heads. I doubt you had to worry about pricking yourself on a recently used needle ever. Those people simply didn't exist on this level back then and there were more options. Please stop with the 'I hiked uphill both ways' routine... life is worse now than in 1996 in almost every way. We shouldn't be expected to ignore it and just put up with it. People should stop making excuses for it and address the root of the problem.

Meth and heroin were massive problems in the 80s and 90s. Go and watch Trainspotting which was literally made in the year you mentioned and then come back and defend your point about public toilets in the 90s not being drug litter riddled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB6rig1lYTc

Yes, they existed, but definitively not in the same potency (i.e. fentanyl) or volume and were more expensive and harder to get. Not every public toilet in the 80s/90s was completely taken over by deranged homeless drug addicts like it is now. The problem is much more difficult. It's not the same at all.

When I was a kid growing up in the 80s/90s, you rarely saw homeless camps like they are now where they openly use drugs. You never saw public restrooms that were completely disgusting. Fast food bathrooms were clean back then.. now they are horrible. Things are not the same... The worst bathrooms back then were at the public parks where they were covered in pee and not cleaned well, but weren't destroyed by drug usage like they are now. I don't remember seeing piles of needles (or even one needle) like you do now.

> Even the government deems it infeasible.

Because they are underfunded often.

If the government is underfunded enough to not be able to hire bathroom cleaners, how can anyone expect a barely surviving retail business to afford it?

Funny how the government is "underfunded", yet can spend billions and trillions on plenty of things.

The parts of government responsible for public toilets are not the ones spending billions or trillions of dollars on things.

Yeah, I did this at 16 at a gas station and got paid 8.75 an hour, there are lots of people out there doing this type of work in the private sector. Its not glamorous thats for sure but supply/demand will dictate the labor market. The government doesn't deem it infeasible because hiring is difficult, its because they aren't willing to pay a reasonable wage for the work.

Obviously there exists a price at which people will do it. But if the government isn't willing to pay it, it seems unfair to expect businesses to pay it.

How many likely Heptitis-infected needles and excrement smears did you clean up? per week or per day? Try 10x that and see if 8.75/hour is still setting your 16 year old mind with visions of dancing Super Nintendos and Segas.

Go touch grass, you seem a little angry for a forum.

I won't do your homework for you but there's people that have done the work of reporting out the numbers it takes to operate a clean government bathroom. It's not just "reasonable wage" territory. It's "civilization can't afford this" level expensive, the type of problem you can't throw money at because it's so bad it's obvious that the real problem and solution exists elsewhere.

And it's only in the West that public restrooms are that expensive. Japans are less expensive because the locals use them like civilized people and they don't have enormous on-going cleaning and repair costs.

So, the problem isn't in paying the cleaners. It's upstream. No pun intended.

I don’t disagree that the problem is difficult and has various surface areas to address, but everyone can’t blame the drug users when even putting up the stall costs north of $500,000. That’s just governmental bureaucracy at play.

Additionally, not all areas of the country are infested with the “homeless and drug addicts”. People can spin that all they like but areas where people take care of their local services are plentiful.

Lastly, don’t talk to me about prohibitive pricing in government initiates. When we stop spending hundreds of billions bombing other countries, then come talk about things being too expensive.

Nice condescending comment about the homework though, you must have been pleased with that one.

Why is it so infeasible for government to keep their facilities clean, while Buc-ee's can have sparkling clean facilities and still turn a profit?

Infeasible for a government would mean it is sufficiently expensive that it is not politically popular to spend that much money on public bathrooms.

Also, Buc-ees does not offer free bathrooms in urban, dense areas with higher proportions of mentally ill and drug addicted populations, so that comparison makes no sense.

I used Buc-ee's as an example because they're famous for their clean bathrooms. But there certainly exist clean bathrooms in urban areas. I'd venture to say that those aren't all in high-end establishments that exclude any "riff-raff". It's possible to find clean toilets in urban McDonald's or Wal-Mart; maybe not all of them, but certainly not none either.

And regarding expense on public bathrooms:

* San Francisco spent $1.7M on a single toilet

* Seattle spend $5 installing 5 toilets.

* NYC's public restrooms routinely cost $2M-$4M

Now, those are building projects rather than ongoing operations. But it shows that governments are willing to spend absurd amounts on toilets.

I don't know exactly what the problem is, but there's something about government (mis)management in the issue.

The problem is a small minority ruining the commons.

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2026/08/vandals-set-fires-i...

Sure, but why is it that government-run institutions are (we're being told in this thread) uniquely vulnerable to the problem? Why isn't it happening at Buc-ee's or at McDonald's in the same degree?

Those places are staffed or closed between 10pm and 7am, dissuading vandals:

>The vandalism happened between about 10 p.m. on Aug. 21 and 7 a.m. the following day, according to officials.

But also, the lack of desire to spend money on staffing government restrooms in the first place.

Was a cart pusher at target and was frequently shanghaid into cleaning toilets.

I think you might be giving away the class you were raised in if you think it’s infeasible to pay people to clean toilets.

I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. If it was feasible, the OP’s article wouldn’t be describing a real phenomenon.

As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restrooms were obliterated, and caused quite a bit of rancor among the staff, resulting in restrictions on who could use them.

But that is neither here nor there on the current supply and demand of people willing to do that job.

>I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades.

Cool.

My point was that I was a minimum wage worker and still cleaning toilets. Did it for minimum wage. There were many other coworkers doing the same.

You said

> Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible.

That's only plausible if you were unwilling to do so yourself and couldn't conceive of anyone else doing the job.

Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is.

If you are claiming its infeasible to pay for someone to do that job, you are just saying you dont think that anyone should be paid to do the job.

No, I am writing that supply and demand curves can shift such that the job you used to for minimum wage is no longer a job one can expect to hire for minimum wage in Aug 2026.

>Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is.

Today, real life says that is not sufficient pay if we want more public bathrooms (in the places lacking them, such as urban, high density areas).

My conclusions are not based on my feelings or opinions, but a simple observations of real life market trends.

ah I see. Anything that is currently not being done is infeasible.

No, anything that was being done that changed to not being done usually has a reason.

Businesses don't spend money to put locks on bathrooms for the fun of it.

Given enough money, there would be people willing to do all that, buy proper gear and disinfectants, etc.

But that would cost so much that most municipalities or businesses would not afford that.

Some places, of course, do afford that; they are relatively few, as one might expect. Especially as people become more wealthy and the cost of their work grows.

As I asked elsewhere, why is it infeasible for government to do this, but Buc-ee's can have sparklingly clean facilities while still turning a profit?

This might tell us something about the nature of government management or employment.

Doesn’t literally every bathroom need someone to clean up body fluids and odors from time to time? At the last gas station, big box hardware store, and McDonalds I visited in the West, log sheets hung inside the bathrooms indicating they’re supposedly cleaned as often as hourly.

It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.

What are you taking about? Literally every restaurant and retail worker has had to do this. I was cleaning toilets in high school. You think restaurant restrooms are clean before the workers go in to clean them? You think people aren't shitting in urinals in Best Buy?

Obviously, it is priced into operating a restaurant, where there have to be restrooms. In the context of the comment I replied to:

>How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.

The labor costs of having a bathroom be cleaned (in certain regions) might very well be cost prohibitive, hence the OP’s linked article. For example, Best Buy has to spend money to keep bathrooms clean, whereas online only vendors don’t. Maybe it can make sense for Best Buy (or smaller operations like coffee shops) to not have a restroom.

Every single front end employee in the new england grocery chain has cleaned the toilets.

Every single employee in a fast food establishment has cleaned toilets, including the horrors you blame on homeless people, like shit smeared on things.

Every single Circle-K employee has cleaned toilets.

The cost for hiring someone to clean toilets is minimum wage.

You don't see how maintaining a bathroom where the worst of society engage in public sex, do drugs, and shit it up in general - is more of a liability than without those things happening?

The same liability exists without them.

The problem was not eliminated. If anything, the effects were amplified.

It just moved the poop mess and dirty needles from one defined space back to everywhere else. In this way, they're easier to accidentally encounter while out-and-about, and yet simultaneously harder to intentionally find and clean up.

I think this kind of result has strong resemblance to what is colloquially known as a footgun.

A friend owns pizza restaurants. They leapt at the opportunity during covid to shut their bathrooms to the public, and have continued to (illegally) keep the bathrooms closed as much as possible.

People made horrific messes in them. Employees and/or owners had to clean them. They don't wish to do so. Public messes; private employees and/or owners being made to clean them is pretty much the story.

You’re making the mistake of thinking there’s a top down process. That’s not what’s happening. It goes like this: “if I close my public restroom then all of the people asking for a public restroom will have to go across the street and they will not bother me anymore“

The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision

I've made no such mistake.

Closing bigger public bathrooms and switching to individually lockable bathrooms - cells, basically, often with codes if at a business did work.

It filters out that bottom 10% that can't coherently speak or present themselves to pass a vibe check in asking for bathroom access.

Things did improve for those with standards, at the cost of having to deal with the bathroom equivalent of barbed wire topped walls around your home compound. That IS better than walking in on the bottom 10% or the disasters they create, but only slightly.

Collectively, squeezing the bottom out by denying them access building by building, block by block has helped turn parts of cities around. It's not that different than locking up your food high in the air when camping so animals don't get into it - they don't come around and stop coming around if they are.

> A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?

It certainly had some limitating factor. Until late 2010-early 2020s, public displays of gay sex were considered improper rather than brave, injecting drugs in public was a matter for the police, and shitting on the streets was considered a nuisance that could be avoided by the shitter having self-agency and choosing to shit elsewhere.

But a public restroom that has effectively been destroyed isn't really any better than no public restroom.

> Nothing has been improved in this process.

It isn't about improving things or fixing the problem, it is about mitigating cost.

Public sex, shooting up drugs, and vandalism still occur; but the owner/operator of the bathroom no longer has to maintain the bathroom or deal with individuals complaining about the poor state of the bathroom as a result of the behavior.

We are experiencing "changing consumer habits"

Homelessness and the post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it. A few people who need to use a public bathroom everyday is fine, but when you have 100x of ppl who are desuetude, on drugs, mentally ill etc. emptying their medications and needles and so on it becomes a public health hazard, attracts crime, and overwhelms staff. Better to just shut it down altogether or limit to staff only. .

Good thing that stops the "destitute, on drugs, mentally ill etc" from doing this simply by removing the public toilets right?

Well it becomes someone else's problem, right? That kind of short-term thinking is in vogue at the moment.

Portland put out portable toilets during the pandemic. They had big signs on them about how toilet access was a human right, or something like that.

One by one, they were all burned down. Homeless people seem to be really good at destroying stuff. My apartment building is taking on new low income tenants and the rate of fires - with sprinkler activation - is boggling. The public park I walk by often is losing a little bit more greenery to homeless fires every few months, but I’m still saddened by the loss of a large, beautiful tree - torched by a camper.

The problem isn’t removing public resources, it’s keeping them in working order against a persistent opponent.

Seems like the problem is the utter lack of mental health support to me.

The utter lack of it? There's an entire industrial complex around homeless "support" to do magic tricks on money.

Portland's county allocates $9m annually. LA's county allocates $4b annually. Should it be 2x that? 20x? 200x before any positive change occurs?

"Mental health" is a non-answer designed to shift accountability and agency from individuals into everyone else vis a vis whatever system is expected to provide this vague "support", despite the failed track record of these systems to improve anything but their employees' and contractors' pockets.

The point isn't to stop them, it's to prevent them from ruining public places for everyone else. A homeless man pooing/injecting behind a dumpster is way better than the floor of a restaurant bathroom.

> post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it

but the US is not poor. The US has the richest "poor" people in the entire world. There is a massive social security net with massive redistribution. There was no "post-2008 wave of poverty".

huge surge of homeless camps, people going on various disability programs, job loss and ppl not returning to labor force. it's possible for the US to be collectivity wealthier yet a lot of people poorer.

Ten percent is way too optimistic, I'd say 20% are destroying everything for the majority.

We are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow (or are expected to follow) are based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property come from the bottom quintile, the dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there, and our zoning laws (in the US) are developed for fear of the bottom quintile.

Pretty much all of that is false.

The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow.

The taxes I pay support way more than just the bottom quintile. I'm actually in the UK but I guess you're in the US, so here's a rough breakdown based on this infographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni....

Much the biggest chunk of US federal spending is Social Security, the great majority of which is pensions. Pensioners are very variable but they're mostly not in the bottom quintile. Then "nondefense discretionary" spending which is a mixed bag but again is mostly not bottom quintile. After that comes Medicare which again is mostly pensioners. Then defense, which isn't really "to support" any particular subset of the population. Then Medicaid, a lot of which is for poorer people, so I'll give you that one. Then "other" which from the description in the chart is mostly not bottom quintile. Then income security programs, which is probably mostly bottom quintile. If we say that all of Medicaid and income security are "bottom quintile", 10% each of Social Security and Medicare, and 20% each of "nondefense discretionary" and "other", go to support the bottom quintile -- which I think is probably all on the generous side -- then that comes to about $1.56T out of $6.1T of spending, or out of $5.5T if you prefer not to count debt servicing.

The greatest risks to my life and property are from disease (for my life), wear and tear plus accident (for my physical property), and stock market instability (for my investments). None of those things has much to do with the bottom quintile.

In the US, homicides are about 0.02% of deaths, and most of those happen to people within that bottom quintile you evidently resent so much.

The dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there and not-bottom-quintile people like you want to make those spaces as unwelcoming to them as possible even at the cost of making them less comfortable for everyone. And also because your society has failed to provide the bottom quintile with better places for the things you don't like them doing than those public spaces.

It may well be true that zoning laws are developed for fear of the bottom quintile. You might want to consider the possibility that the fear is as much of a problem there as the bottom quintile itself.

I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.

> > I'm actually in the UK

> I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.

Yes. In the UK the rate of incest is increasing due to migration from Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan. An NHS Genomics Education Programme blog in Sept 2025 acknowledged the risk of birth defects doubling, but cited the benefits of 'stronger family support', 'economic advantages' and argued against a ban in favour of 'counselling and education'.

Despite the vast majority of the British public not participating in incest, the NHS seemed to think it is right that they pay for the care of the people that do.

A common shared resource - the NHS - is exploited by the worst people (who value economic advantages over their child's health) and everyone suffers.

https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2061

Honestly one of the most egregious things I've read about the NHS - actively promoting behavior that makes the lives of innocent children unnecessarily harder, and forcing everyone to contribute to supporting frankly disgusting behavior.

Here is the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press): https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom...

Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is.

A few further remarks.

--1-- Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.

You have the right to try to fix a broken tile on your roof by climbing out of your window without any sort of safety equipment, even though you might fall and need medical treatment, even in countries where the government will pay some or all of your hospital bills.

You have the right to eat too much or too little, or to drink a lot of alcohol or smoke a lot of cigarettes, even though in the long run these things will be bad for your health, which as well as possibly requiring expensive medical care will also make you a less economically productive member of society.

You have the right (in most places, including the UK and the US) to agitate for fascism or communism, even though if your agitation succeeds the resulting government will probably be very bad on net.

--2-- "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]".

--3-- The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Indeed, the people who might need extra care as a result of first-cousin marriage are not the people who enter into those marriages, but some of their children.

If your preference is for such children not to receive NHS healthcare, you're punishing the children for the actions of their parents. I think this is generally considered bad policy.

Regarding point 1 I refer to point 3 and regarding point 3 i refer to point 1.

I don't think I understand; would you care to be more explicit?

Not the person you're asking but it's fairly obvious:

> 1. things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources

> 3. The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do".

Increasing pressure on communities' resources is that community paying for people that engage in incest.

You are (and perhaps the other person also is) mixing up three questions.

1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal?

In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have costs, one of which is that it increases the number of children born with genetic problems that make their lives worse and (if the government pays for medical treatment to mitigate them) costs money. So the answer to the first question is yes, and so far as I can tell no one disagrees.

If some pairs of first cousins marry, and their children have genetic problems, then some of the costs are paid by those children. In a country with socialized healthcare like the UK, the default is that some other costs -- those of helping the children to have longer and/or better lives -- are paid by the government, and hence by everyone's taxes.

You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that. You might want to identify some community that they belong to and somehow make them pay, but that's pretty difficult to do; the UK isn't set up to levy different taxes on (say) Muslims or people whose ancestors lived in Bangladesh or whatever, and on the whole that seems obviously a good thing.

You might want to argue that in any case the nation shouldn't be paying, and that the NHS should refuse to treat whatever problems those children might have. In that case it will be the children who suffer; I personally am not a fan of making children suffer for their parents' bad decisions, but some people are.

So the second question is certainly one that we could argue about. But the blogpost we are discussing never touches on that question.

What the blogpost is about is the third question. Answering that is a matter of weighing the costs of X against the costs of making X illegal (loss of personal freedoms every time anything is made illegal; making some communities feel persecuted; loss of whatever benefits, if any, communities in which first-cousin marriage is practised get from it; making X happen illegally rather than legally, as opposed to making X not happen).

That again is something that could reasonably be argued about, and the blogpost does argue about it. But, I repeat, it's an entirely separate question from the second one.

So I continue to assert that the article wasn't about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". It didn't discuss that question at all. It discussed the entirely separate question of what measures if any should be taken to make there be fewer "people that do".

> You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages

Yes, hence wanting to ban incest marriages.

> and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that.

No, I and the other commenter are not arguing that. Make incest marriages illegal in the UK, make incest married people ineligible to migrate to the UK. It's very simple. This thread is begininning to resemble the "left wing discourse" quote so I'll stop here.

> https://web.archive.org/web/20250929053102/https://www.genom... Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is.

Thanks, I wasn't able to find an archive. I'm sure you noticed the quotes were accurate and I thank you for the support.

> Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.

Nobody said they were. The argument was that cousin marriage should be illegal since it which doubles the rate of birth defects as the genomics article mentions.

> "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]".

But the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal is very far from "some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost", as I'm sure you're aware.

> The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do"

Yes, it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.

> the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press):

I'm sure you're as thankful for the right wing press for raising awareness of the matter, and likewise am disappointed about the left wing press for ignoring it.

> Nobody said they were.

No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal, and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the community's resources. And I am pointing out that in general the bar for making things illegal is, and should be, higher than that.

> the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal

That is not what happened. Someone wrote a blogpost saying "here's a thing that isn't illegal; some people are saying it should be illegal; here are some arguments for and against". That differs from "proposing that incest not be illegal" in the following three ways: (1) "proposing that X not be illegal" gives the strong impression that X is currently illegal, whereas in fact the thing in question is currently legal; (2) the relevant proposition is not "that incest not be illegal" but "that first-cousin marriage not be illegal"; first-cousin marriage is not incest in UK law, nor in many other jurisdictions' law, and no one[1] is even slightly proposing that incest in general should be legalized; (3) the blog post does not take the position that first-cousin marriage should definitely be legal. It does quote some other people and organizations that think it shouldn't be made illegal.

[1] Well, I bet someone somewhere is. "All universal generalizations are false". But no such proposal is made or discussed in the blog post in question.

I do agree that it seems likely that the author of the blogpost thinks that it wouldn't be a good idea to illegalize first-cousin marriage; but there is an important distinction between "putting up a blog post that seems on the whole not favourable to doing X" and "proposing that X not be done".

> Yes it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.

It probably does. (Though you might recall, having now read the article, that it points out an expert's opinion that most of the increase in birth-defect risks in these communities comes not from the existence of first-cousin marriages in particular but from the general practice of marriages between somewhat-related people, which banning first-cousin marriages would not change.)

But that's an entirely separate matter from whether the blogpost was about whether the NHS should pay for the resulting birth defects. Suppose the UK bans first-cousin marriages, and some people have children with their first cousins anyway, and some of the resulting children have birth defects. Should the NHS treat those children? I say: of course it should. Perhaps you would prefer to let the children suffer or die without whatever help the healthcare system could have offered them. But the blogpost doesn't address that at all. It isn't even slightly about who the NHS should treat.

> I'm sure you're as thankful [...]

Nope. The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me, and in any case its presence or absence surely makes zero difference to whether first-cousin marriages actually get made illegal or not, and to whether any given pair of first cousins actually get into one or not. I doubt the right-wing media feeding frenzy did either very much good or very much harm directly, but I bet it helped to stoke the widespread hate and fear of immigrants which seems like it might lead to the next government being run by Reform, who I firmly expect to be incompetent buffoons who will do a great deal of harm to the UK whether or not their positions on social wedge-issues like immigration, transgender people, etc., have any merit.

As for the left-wing press, there isn't much of a left-wing press in this country; I suppose there's the Guardian and the Mirror but both are pretty milquetoast (which on the whole I am glad of; I think the more extreme forms of leftism are mostly misguided).

> The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me

Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible?

I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years, and a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks, that has led to people not disliking the immigration system that allowed the rape and terrorism. But perhaps you are right, people that disagree with incest are at fault.

> Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible?

Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said. I'll come back to that later. Anyway:

As I said in an earlier comment, not everything bad should be illegal. First-cousin marriage is (or at least seems to me) a bad idea; it seems very unlikely to me that its benefits outweigh its costs. But in something that's trying to be a free society we very frequently allow people to do things that are bad ideas.

Do you think it should be illegal to have children when over the age of 35? That causes increased birth defects, I think about as many per instance as first-cousin marriage does. Do you think it should be illegal to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol while pregnant? Ashkenazi Jewish people have a very substantially increased risk of some genetic problems; should they be forbidden to have children?

I dunno, maybe you do think all those things should be illegal, in which case there's no inconsistency in calling for first-cousin marriage also to be illegal. But I'm guessing you don't, for reasons along the lines of "it's usually better to allow people to do things they want rather than having the government intervene heavy-handedly in their lives". That is also the main reason why it might be a bad idea to make first-cousin marriage illegal.

With that said: I repeat, I did not in fact say that "allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible". I said that the blogpost is sensible. There is not a valid inference from "document X is sensible" to "everything that document X, overall, seems to be in favour of is sensible".

The blogpost looks at arguments for and against banning first-cousin marriage. It doesn't, explicitly, take a definite position on that question, though it does seem like its author thinks that first-cousin marriage shouldn't be made illegal. I think it's a sensible blogpost; I would think the same if its author had the opposite apparent leaning, if it had the same overall shape of presenting reasonable arguments on both sides. If I think about the matter some more and decide that actually banning first-cousin marriage would on net be a good idea, I expect I will still think the blogpost is pretty sensible.

> I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years

The Rotherham scandal was scandalous, I agree, and it seems likely that the police deliberately avoided investigating properly because they were afraid of being called racists, and all of that is very bad. But I don't see how you get from there to "therefore the British immigration system is bad". Consider another scandal involving a lot of sexual abuse of minors: the one around Jeffrey Epstein. The people involved in that were mostly (not exclusively, but mostly) rich middle-aged white men. Do we conclude that we should be trying to keep rich middle-aged white men out of the country? Most people don't. Rather, we say: here was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be rich middle-aged white men, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to rich middle-aged white men then we should change that.

Likewise, in Rotherham there was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be Pakistani immigrants or children thereof, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to Pakistani immigrants and their children then we should change that.

But being a rich white middle-aged man, or a poor Pakistani young man, isn't some kind of guarantee of being a sexual abuser, and we would do no one any favours by attaching the crimes of the individuals to the whole group and saying: let's get all the rich white middle-aged men out of the country. Or all the poor Pakistani young men.

(In both cases you could make an argument that it wasn't all coincidence that the people came from those particular demographics. E.g., if your mode of sexual abuse involves sequestering the victims on a private island then it's much easier to do if you're a billionaire; some Pakistani communities have traditionally had very high rates of child-marriage and maybe those traditions make men from those communities more likely to become child abusers or something. But in both cases we can also observe that there are an awful lot of rich white middle-aged men and poor Pakistani young men who somehow manage not to abuse any children at all, and conclude that it's probably better to target the crime itself rather than some broad demographic within which we found a bunch of criminals.)

> a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks

Yeah, maybe getting up to an average of one event a year, with a total (coming mostly from a couple of particularly severe cases) of something like 100 deaths from terrorism in the last 25 years. Four deaths a year! That's almost one third as many as people dying from having their clothes catch fire, and almost a quarter as many as people drowning in their bathtubs!

Obviously 100 deaths from terrorism is 100 too many. (And 100 deaths from people drowning in their bathtubs is 100 too many.) But, with terrorism as with bathtubs, the number is actually not all that large, and it doesn't make a great justification for large-scale social change such as radical overhaul of the immigration system.

(It does make a great tool for stirring up xenophobia, though.)

> Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said

Yes it was. You said a blog post the advocated incest being illegal was sensible. It was the only actual point you made, amid a long rant about:

- how the law doesn’t define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)

- that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)

- that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article (which is apparently a complaint for some unstated reason and also has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)

I even quoted where you did it.

I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing".

Your response is to ignore all of that and just reiterate "you said the blogpost was sensible, therefore you think this particular thing is sensible". The very thing I had just been explaining that I think is an error.

I am not sure whether you're not reading what I write, or unable to understand what I write (presumably, if so, not out of sheer mental incapacity but because politics makes idiots of us all), or deliberately misrepresenting what I write, but whether it's any of those or some other thing I haven't thought of it's making it seem increasingly unlikely that any actual fruitful discussion is possible.

> It was the only actual point you made

Of course this is utterly false, not least because your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made. I assume you mean something like "the only point you made that I consider relevant", in which case we have different views of what is relevant.

> how the law doesn't define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)

It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest" on every occasion, thus turning "I think a blogpost arguing that first-cousin marriage should not necessarily be made illegal was, on the whole quite sensible" into "you think allowing incest is sensible".

> that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)

It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and write about suggestions that the thing not be made illegal as if they were suggesting that the thing be made legal. Those are quite different things: just as we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs, we also don't try to reverse every bad law because changing the law has costs.

> that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article

Oh, come on. I mentioned that the article was retracted soon after it was published (which is obviously relevant since you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK). It seemed relevant why it was retracted, so I gave an eight-word summary of why. And now you purport to list the topics of my "long rant", and one of the three things you mention is the fact that that incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing".

If you don't like it that my comments are devoting space to complaining about your dishonest rhetoric, then perhaps you should use less dishonest rhetoric. If instead of "the NHS Genomic Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" you had written "a post on the NHS Genomic Education Programme's blog exploring arguments for and against making first-cousin marriage illegal, and evidently leaning toward not making it illegal" -- which is the nearest not-actively-misleading thing I can come up with to what you wrote -- then I wouldn't have had to say any of those things you complained about.

Of course, if you'd written the honest version rather than the dishonest version then it would have been obvious that it didn't give much support for your attempt to represent immigrants in the UK as "the worst people", so I guess that was never really an option.

> I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing".

Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible. If you feel otherwise, communicate better.

> your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made.

But they weren't points, they were irrelevant offtopic facts as discussed.

> whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest"

Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.

> incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing"

You didn't mention the public furore, or the press in general. You specifically mentioned the right wing press. Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.

> we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs

Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking. Which you know.

> you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK

It was representive of government attitudes: the NHS Genomics Education Programme is part of the government. You're intelligent enough to know that too so I'll go back to the point made in the other thread you replied on and leave it there: https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918

> Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible.

Yup. I feel that the argument in the blogpost is sensible. That is not the same thing as thinking that a particular policy that the blogpost leans toward is a sensible policy.

> If you feel otherwise, communicate better.

Good idea! I might try writing a couple of paragraphs distinguishing what I actually said and meant from the similar-sounding but very different thing you said I said. Oh, wait. I did, and you proceeded to ignore it.

> Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.

There are two separate points here. Let's begin with the one you're presenting as if it's the only one, namely whether first-cousin marriage is incest. That's a question of definitions; let's see what the dictionaries say. The Oxford English Dictionary: "The crime of sexual intercourse or cohabitation between persons related within the degrees within which marriage is prohibited; sexual commerce of near kindred." Marrying, or having sex with, your first cousin in the UK is not the first of those things; whether it's the second depends on what counts as "near". (I think it's very reasonable of the OED to leave that unresolved; the point is that what counts as "incest" for a given person will depend on what feels to them like "near kindred".) Chambers says: sex between people closely enough related that marriage is prohibited, so fucking your cousin in the UK is not incest by that definition. Merriam-Webster says the same. Wiktionary: "between close relatives, especially immediate family members and sometimes first cousins", so they're on the fence.

So: no, actually, there is nothing like general agreement that fucking your cousin is incest.

However, that isn't actually the key point here; my own inclination is to define incest (outside specifically legal contexts) broadly enough that it does include first cousins. The reason I object to the way you've been wording things isn't that I think the thing in question isn't incest, it's that there's a difference between claiming something about incest and claiming something about a particular variety of incest.

Specifically, you'd talked about "the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" and one of the many things I found misleading about that was that the blogpost in question was not talking about incest in general but about one particular case of it.

A proposal "that incest not be illegal" would mean, e.g., permitting marriage between brothers and sisters, or fathers and daughters. No such proposal was made, or considered, or so much as gestured at in the blogpost we are discussing.

> Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.

Of course I thought it was relevant, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it. I'm not pretending anything, and I'm getting very bored of your baseless accusations of dishonesty.

You called my comment "a long rant about" three things. One of those things was represented in that "long rant" by, in total, one word in a throwaway remark. Yes, I thought that word was relevant. No, it was not in any way one of the main topics of what I wrote.

> Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost

Like the cost of allowing people to have children when over the age of 35. Do you want that to be illegal? (I have asked you this question before. Of course you have ignored it.)

> that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking.

Here is a complete list of things I have said in this discussion or elsewhere about benefits of cousin fucking.

(That was the list.)

> It was representative of government attitudes [...]

It was a blogpost. The full extent of what anything in it tells us about government attitudes is: there's someone, working for the government, who thinks X and doesn't mind saying so on a blog with the NHS's name attached to it.

That's not nothing. The opinions of people who work for an entity have some connection with the entity's own opinions, in so far as it has them. But they're not the same thing. You can get a sense of where they agree and disagree if, for instance, some sort of public outcry draws attention to the thing that someone wrote so that the institution has to decide whether to stand by it or not. In this case, the institution decided not to stand by it.

No two of the following things are the same. (1) The opinions of some random staffer at the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (2) The opinions that that staffer thinks worthy of inclusion in a blogpost. (3) The opinions of the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (4) The opinions of the NHS. (5) The opinions of the UK government.

In this case, it seems clear that the random staffer was not in favour of making first-cousin marriage illegal. (That's #1.) The blogpost they wrote didn't actually say "first-cousin marriage should not be made illegal", though it also didn't go out of its way to hide its author's opinion. So #2 is already a bit ambiguous. Once the attention of the NHSGEP's management was drawn to the thing, they retracted the blogpost. (That's #3. Of course you can argue about how far they retracted it because it really didn't match the NHSGEP's collective opinion, and how far they just wanted that opinion not to be visible.) #4 and #5 aren't even in the picture.

> https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918

For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link: it complains that a lot of "leftist discourse" consists of people pretending not to understand things.

At no point in this discussion have I pretended not to understand you or the points you're making. For that matter, I'm not sure I've ever suggested or implied that I don't understand you or the points you're making. I just don't agree with them.

There absolutely is a rhetorical pattern where someone acts like they don't understand something, perhaps in order to make the person they're talking to have to make explicit something that they would rather not say in so many words. Sometimes it's a reasonable thing to do. Sometimes it's just being a dick. But I don't think I've done anything of the sort anywhere in this discussion.

There is, unfortunately, also a rhetorical pattern where someone insists that obviously the person they're talking to knows that they're right and is just pretending otherwise. That one's pretty much always just being a dick, and I'm afraid it's what you've done a lot of in the comment I'm replying to right now.

> no point in this discussion have I pretended not to understand you or the points you're making

You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal, and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion. You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal as if there was no cost of doing otherwise and pretended in your most recent mesage that you didn't do that.

> For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link

You need to read a wider set of media. This isn't helping.

> You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal,

I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.

(Well, almost. As I mentioned elsewhere, there are costs to changing a law, so actually whether something is legal now does have some effect on whether it should be legal next year as well. But that wasn't my point.)

> you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal,

I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.

(General point: there may be only one thing that you want to talk about, but that doesn't oblige your interlocutor to talk about only that thing. And, more specifically, if in talking about that one thing you say things that are misleading, it's reasonable for the other guy to point out that you did so.)

> and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion.

I did not. I disagree with you about whether everything posted on a blog belonging to a government department "is a government opinion". There is no pretence involved.

> You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal

(There is, obviously. Also, I remark once again that "making incest illegal" is not an accurate characterization.)

> as if there was no cost of doing otherwise

I absolutely did not; I acknowledged that first-cousin marriage is a bad idea and that it would be better if people didn't do it and that it increases the frequency of genetic problems in resulting children. Saying "doing X has costs" is not remotely the same thing as saying "not doing X has no costs". It's a tradeoff, like everything else in life.

> and pretended in your most recent message that you didn't do that.

I did not.

> You need to read a wider set of media.

Maybe I do, maybe not, but you have absolutely no information about what set of media I read.

You need to stop translating everything you read into the stupidest possible one-bit black-and-white "everything about X is good" / "everything about X is bad" version of itself.

My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of a general air of contempt toward Those People. I took it to mean wealth when talking about taxes, to mean behaviour when talking about laws and risks to life and property, and to be deliberately ambiguous when talking about public spaces and zoning laws.

In any case, neither the factual veracity of the claims nor their support for whatever policies OP could plausibly have had in mind seem to improve on taking "bottom quintile" to mean specifically "worst-behaved quintile". Notably, "the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile" is even more false if it means "the worst people" rather than "the poorest people".

Incidentally, my comment above is currently sitting at -1. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but if anyone reading this downvoted my comment because they thought it was wrong rather than because they disliked it politically or because they didn't want to see this sort of argument on HN, I would be interested to know what they think I was incorrect about. (The trouble with downvotes as a signal for improvement for authors is that it's often very unclear what specific problems they are trying to point at.)

> My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of a general air of contempt toward Those People.

That assumption says a lot more about you that it does the person you were responding to.

It's a guess rather than an assumption -- I wouldn't be astonished if it turned out to be a wrong guess -- but there was a reason for it: some of the comment seemed to require "bottom" to be about wealth, and other bits seemed to require it to be about behaviour. But, again, I could very well be wrong.

Would you care to suggest a concrete definition of "bottom quintile" according to which the claims made by black6 are true?

> The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow.

This is not just laws, but stores putting everything behind plastic barriers to stop theft. Or "customer only" rules for bathrooms. Literally the article in question is discussing this type of rule.

As someone else described, the bottom quintile decides the overall level of trust in a society.

Sometimes I wonder what fraction of America's economic dynamism is based simply on people's desperate desire to make enough money to not have to live around street violence and other kinds of in-your-face social unpleasantness.

And people with means, move from common to private spaces. Others will not have the same choice and things become more stratified, because a subset of society decided to cede public spaces.

It's because 50% of voters are choosing to decriminalize laws and make everything into the oppression olympics. California legislature just proposed allowing 'crimes of necessity' this week. We can't have nice things now because crimes are not enforced/prosecuted and there are no consequences. We're moving from a high trust to low trust society in rapid time.

People who vote in favor of these soft on crime polices should be required to provide a room in their home to these people they want to keep out of jail.

I don't think I quite agree with that.

Virtually all offices I've worked in, the bathrooms have been less than ideally used by colleagues. The people you'd class as 'commons' may not be having public sex, shooting up drugs, but many can be dirty and/or selfish. And this is in an office where cleaners regularly clean the facilities (I'd hazard more frequently than public toilets are cleaned). There's always be pee on the floor, pee on the seat, etc etc.

This is real. But also "pee on the seat" is gross but not the level of damage a diseased homeless dude does to a bathroom.

The distribution in those offices is probably the same, a small percentage of people cause almost all the nastiness.

I'm of the opinion that the pee issue happens when there is no urinal. Insufficient urinals => no toilets in usable state.

For several months, we had someone pissing on the floor of the men's room. I work at an engineering firm in the suburbs, these people all make $100k+ and most are senior professionals. I don't know if they found him by figuring out badge swipes (he hit a lot of bathrooms) or if he just stopped on his own.

It's also entirely possible it was mass hysteria. Sometimes people miss the urinal and maybe some did it to be funny after the signs went up.

> maybe some did it to be funny after the signs went up

That's the antisocial behavior mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

The replies here really exemplify the core reason we have this problem - about 50% of the population (on HN, probably more outside of HN) doesn't understand that everything has an economic cost, and cleaning hepititis-infected needles and excrement smears up all day is an extremely costly activity, not just because no one wants to do it, but because if someone gets sick they'll sue the city for tens millions of dollars.

This thread is more a reminder of how easy it will be to find people to man the gas chambers when Republicans turn their sights on the homeless. Some wretched dehumanizing of people here.

Is it really so surprising?

There's a reason why people lock themselves up in gated communities as soon as they can afford to. People want nice things, and out there they can't have nice things. Society sucks. Everything public sucks. Better to create your own little oasis of goodness in private property so that those who would ruin it literally cannot enter.

Elitism is the private solution. Public spaces are still unsolved. You'd do well to present a solution. Ignoring it and then accusing society of "dehumanization" is not gonna solve anything. There's a limit to the general suckiness people are willing to tolerate before they radicalize and vote for the guy promising to clean it all up.

Correct, as evidence, look how easy it was to make you overlook the current abuses of the homeless (at the hands of corrupt nonprofits) because it doesn't look sufficiently fascist to trigger you.

Some people here seem to identify with that 10%.

>The worst 10%

In reality, about 2% or even less.

We could live in paradise if we just removed them from society. Put them in a box.

You’re suggesting imprisoning over 160 million people. That’s orders of magnitude higher than even the largest Holocaust estimates. It’s more than the population of Russia.

No. Not prison. Prison is inhumane.

Death.

Repeat offenders, those who are violent, rape, or murder are removed forever from society. There is no reason for a rapist or thief to be permitted to murder after their 2nd 3rd, or 4th offense.

Locking away someone for a large portion of their life to deny them employment, rob them of education, limit their positive contributions, and subjecting their families to the inability to bring wholeness is unjust and unkind.

HN is getting insane. One person is suggesting “removing from society” 2% of people, the other is outright explicitly calling for their deaths, and the comment on the insanity and scale of it all is the one getting downvoted.

Removing people with whom the group with the power of the sword is exactly what happens. Religion A does not like Religion B which eventually leads to laws, wars, genocide.

Most of these inside thoughts are not well accepted in a diverse, multicultural, professional setting so they go unspoken.

I would also argue that the desire to remove 'them' is universal because of safety or desire. I think we disagree on the criteria which is really where the factions start their battle. Do we use criteria based upon belief, genetics, or agency?

The problem is lack of enforcement and the fact that politicians are disconnected from working class and most simply hate them and don't care.

Let the pleb piss in the hedges like animals they are, meanwhile spaff the taxes on some vanity projects so the mates can buy new yachts.

I wish we had capital punishment for corruption like in China.

> I wish we had capital punishment for corruption like in China.

The selective enforcement is insane. If it really applied to everybody then China would be a free country because the entire CCP would have been executed.

In practice, it's only for enemies of the powerful (which is mostly the coalition around Xi). Even then, most CCP members who are convicted get a much milder punishment

make people pay and this problem is solved. it blows my mind that there is an obvious solution here that we simply refuse to touch because... principle?

This might be the your missing puzzle piece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...

> Who ultimately determines the meaning of a public space: its designers, authorities, or the people who use it?

Restrooms are unique in that they are available to the public but, due to their inherently private nature, are a place where it is difficult to enforce social norms. Because of this, within the confines of the restroom itself, the authorities are all but irrelevant.

I was scrolling through the addictive and easy to stumble into YouTube reels feature and came upon a livestream of a gentleman having some sort of 'public restroom party' in a stall. By this, I mean he had collected every roll of toilet paper available, shredded them into confetti, and was throwing the confetti up into the air while blasting music at full volume out of his bluetooth speaker. He had a few thousand viewers and people appeared to be donating money for supercomments. I didn't stay to watch the end of the livestream, but I don't imagine he cleaned up.

By the time the private-but-livestreamed confetti party is over, the damage is done. You can try to anticipate every single unwanted activity in a restroom and try to prevent it beforehand (e.g. tinted lights to prevent IV drug use), but someone, somewhere will find a way to creatively make the owners decide a few frustrated customers who are told "no public restroom" is a small price to pay for the alternative.

You just charge for it. A dollar per entry should be enough for someone to come by and clean it twice a day, such that it doesn't matter what shenanigans antisocial people get up to in there. No mess will last longer than a few hours.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This approach has been shown to work. The money isn't for funding the maintenance though, it's strictly to keep the riff-raff out.

Well hopefully not, because you don't want them pissing and shitting in alleys.

That appeared to be the norm in Italy when we visited earlier this summer. Most of the main towns in Puglia seemed to have at least one pay-per-use toilet.

I was in France recently and used a public restroom. It had an attendant, and a fee of €0.50. Charging for the restroom is unfortunate, but this setup is certainly better than eliminating public restrooms entirely.

That practically ensures that some people who have to go really badly, and for whom €0.50 is a big deal, will just drop their business on the sidewalk.

Somehow that seems ensured regardless.

how is that different from what they'd do if the pay toilet didn't exist?

It also makes it more likely that hobos and drug addicts don't soil and destroy the public bathrooms.

The only place in France I have seen this happen was Paris and public toilets are free there. I haven't seen paid toilets at all in France for a long time, actually. Maybe in train stations though.

This was a year ago in Nice for reference.

Oh I don't doubt you, I was just reflecting that I think that paid toilets have largely been made free in the last 10 years or so.

But I'm sure there still exist quite a few, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were especially found in right-wing cities like Nice.

The modern toilet should let you pay with your personal info:

Toilet: "Sign up (learn more) or proceed with Google Account ..."

Google: "pissoir.fr wants access to your pissing history ...(Y/n)"

Toilet: By pissing here, you consent to the collection and analysis of urine samples ..

My town in the US has something like this. Several portable toilet trailers that are typically stationed near public gathering areas all year round, and moved to accommodate large events. They're significantly nicer than porta potties, and are about on par with any public bathroom accessed from outside. They require the ability to either scan a QR code, or send/receive SMS. They've always been clean any time I've used them, and have some mechanisms to report cleanliness issues back to toilet HQ.

I was in Nice as well and found one place that had a public urinal(my back was literally to people walking around). It was a bit odd...but I really had to go.

Yes; the inverse is not true; making it free won't ensure that it won't happen.

I went to Paris a month ago and saw paid public toilets. Those enclosed things on the sidewalk.

I was just in Paris and I never had to pay for the public sidewalk toilets. Where did you see paid ones? I didn't get to all the arrondisements, so I'm curious.

I don't remember actually. I was staying in Montparnasse so the 14th. Was 1 Euro wherever it was. Might've been this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5vPoD7jM3ELyP6gL7

And it's not this other one on the same street, cause this was free https://maps.app.goo.gl/Firjcsabthu8DHtQ6

That makes sense; I didn't spend any time in the 14th. I did notice a big difference in public bathroom availability based on arrondisement, but all the ones I saw/used were free. (The ones that weren't closed or out of order, that is...)

I've seen paid toilets in train stations (last month in le Mans, a few years ago in a corner of Montparnasse station, though that was before the last round of renovation) and in a mall (CNIT in la Defense). Some RATP train stations have public toilets that you can access with your train ticket, so it's not quite free.

> but this setup is certainly better than eliminating public restrooms entirely.

    - Ask the attendant.
    - Explain the problem.
    - Someone behind you gives you fifty cents.
    - Attendant waves you in.
    - Come back and pay later.
    - Someone nearby helps.

The 50 cents is dual purpose, the one is obvious in that it pays for the attendant and them keeping it clean, but the other is like using a coin to unlock a trolley, it cuts back misuse by a lot. Once you've been to free vs 50 cent toilets a few times you'll see (and smell) the difference.

The trolley analogy doesn't really hold up in this context, does it?

The incentive to do the right thing that a coin-deposit shopping cart ("trolley") adds is the ultimate return of that coin. It's not much money, but it is nonetheless returned when the cart is put back where it belongs.

If a cart always costs 50 cents and there is no hope of ever getting that money back, then: The monetary incentive to return the cart doesn't exist.

Well, even if you don’t get your 50 cents back you usually have an incentive to leave the restroom when you’re done.

Does stretching the analogy help to ameliorate the difference betwixt a payment and a returnable deposit?

Be...twixt?

Yes, it's a word.

It's an archaic word.

It's one of my most favored of words.

> If a cart always costs 50 cents and there is no hope of ever getting that money back, then: The monetary incentive to return the cart doesn't exist

The grandparent post is just talking about incentives.

I guess what you're saying is that if you pay 50 cents for the bathroom then there's no actual incentive to keep it clean because the 50 cents is gone either way, unlike a cart deposit?

You're probably right about that, but I also don't think most people actually need an incentive not to make a huge mess. I would put money that most messes in public bathrooms are caused by the people that the 50 cent charge filters out. The rest experience some social pressure from the attendant to keep things clean. If all else fails, the attendant can clean up a mess before the next person uses it

In Australia all toilets are free and they are mostly in great condition. I was surprised visiting Italy and having to pay money for some of the worst maintained toilets I’d seen.

manning the loo in a developed country would be a much higher expense, and that too if you can convince someone to do it.

In theory, yes.

In practice, no.

In my experience there is no correlation between payment and state of bathroom. I've been to paid ones in terrible state and free ones in amazing state. And I also don't see any trend or correlation there.

Would much prefer this than what we have in NYC, which is go into a bar or cafe, buy something small and then use the restroom. Another thing I'll do sometimes is if I see a busy bar where the bartender isn't paying attention you can walk in, pretend you're looking for friends you're meeting, use the toilet and then sneak out.

As the result will be shit and piss elsewhere in the open, a compromise could be having shitty free public toilets and nice toilets where you pay (or maybe not nice, but bearable).

The alternative would be social workers, more psychotherapists, free healthcare, ...

Surely more social workers will stop people from pissing on the floor

Not all people are doomed from the start to become asocial messed up beings. Probably no one is - but they all have a history and their reasons. And even messed up beings who don't mind shitting anywhere - can suddenly get some conscience again, if someone speaks to them in the right words.

Also even the most messed up people would use a urinal, if avaiable.

Public toilets are one thing that I really appreciate about living in Japan. It seems like you're never too far away from a toilet - whether it be in a neighborhood park, a roadside parking area, train station, convenience store, etc. And they tend to be pretty clean (at least as far as public restooms go), not something that I dread using like I do many public restrooms in the US.

Japan seems to be just about a best-case scenario, due to the ubiquity of convenience stores, the government's seemingly high prioritization of building and maintaining public toilets, and a culture which places a high value on cleanliness.

It seems like it would be hard to replicate in countries that lack clean and plentiful public toilets without changing the culture first. But reading another comment it sounds like China has made great strides in improving the state of their public toilets due to a strong push from leadership. So it is possible, but again it would start with actually wanting to improve things.

I've just about never had an issue finding a toilet, like you said. Parking/service areas are great and nothing like rest stops in, say, California

There are _some_ neighborhoods, especially in Tokyo, where sometimes it can be difficult. Like certain parts of Koenji you can walk into random conbini that have locked bathrooms and signs saying no public use. Fortunately it's not all too common.

Only thing about public toilets in places like parks or neighborhoods is they almost never have soap.

Yeah there are two convenience stores that I know of within about an hour of me that are a bit defensive of their toilets.

One is near a popular fishing spot, and probably got tired of people coming in smelling like dead fish, using the toilet, and not buying anything. They have a big sign saying the toilets are for customers only, and a map with directions to nearby public toilets. They don't actually lock the doors, though.

The other one I'm not really sure what their reasoning is, but the owner installed a button behind the counter to remotely unlock the bathroom door, and you have to ask the guy behind the counter to use the toilet. There are a ton of 1-star reviews on Google mentioning the toilet situation.

But other than those two I don't think I've ever had an issue using a toilet at a convenience store.

Also on a side note - it's pretty hilarious reading reviews of convenience stores in Japan. Lots of 1 star reviews because someone was cut in line, the worker didn't say thank you on the way out, the manner in which the worker placed items in the bag, an item was not microwaved enough, etc.

But then japan has the opposite problem with trash bins.

There was a stretch of road around 600m long, where there were at least 100 vending machine and exactly ZERO trash containers. And no, people did not keep after themselves, I saw plenty of discarded cans on the floor, just slightly outside of vision.

Tokyo, 2025.

Generally the norm is to have a recycling bin for cans and plastic bottles right next to every vending machine (or group of machines). At least that’s the case 99% of the time when I buy a drink at a vending machine. And vendors that sell food/drinks will typically allow you to dispose of any remaining trash when you are finished.

In heavily touristed areas, though, it’s become a topic of much outrage on social media where people are illegally dumping garbage in recycling bins. A lot of times foreigners are blamed - and to be fair there are lots of videos out there of foreigners disposing of trash incorrectly - but of course it’s not just foreigners who are responsible. And this illegal dumping seems to have led to some vendors not putting out recycling bins in heavily touristed areas.

A new law was passed in December 2025, in response to increasing amounts of litter in some areas of Tokyo, which requires vendors who sell food to install trash cans. It also imposed new fines for littering [1]. So possibly the area where you experienced this issue has already seen some improvement in the past year. However, the linked article also says that vending machine operators in those areas were already required by law to put out recycling bins.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of people will just leave a can on the ground next to the vending machine if no bin is provided (or if the bin is full). The expectation is generally that if you sell some food or drink item, you also should accept the trash after it’s consumed, even if it's not legally required. So it seems like vendors are “punished” with a pile of trash for breaking that social contract, or people just otherwise feel entitled.

On a similar note, if you ever buy food from a food truck or stall, the vendor will usually happily dispose of any trash when you’re finished - even if they don’t explicitly put a trash can out.

In my opinion though public trash cans and public toilets aren’t really equivalent. It may be inconvenient, but you can always just hold onto trash until you reach a suitable place to dispose of it. But when it comes to using the toilet - and especially for children or people with certain disabilities - there’s a limit to how long you can hold it in.

[1] https://soranews24.com/2025/12/11/tokyo-considering-law-requ...

Do they cost money in Japan, typically?

I don't think I ever saw paid toilet in Japan.

A paid toilet was actually one of the gotchas of "oh, right, we are back home". :)

I just LOVE that you can find a public (and well maintained that) toilet in Japan within a walking distance wherever you are. It's just so... civilized.

I often see ppl urinating in the public here in Europe - taxi drivers in the bushes where I talk walks, two days ago I saw elder folks just doing it near the sidewalk; but can I blame them? - often you just can't find a goddamn toilet even if you want to; so humiliating when you're just forced to do it because of - you know - body

This seems to be happening in public parks also. I visit two cities literally half way across the country from one another, and have visited them for decades. All of the public restrooms in the public city parks (which are quite popular with locals and tourists) are gone. First they closed them, then they tore down the buildings. Locals thought "oh, must be putting in new ones", but no, they were torn down and never replaced.

Around where I live, they first shut down during covid with the excuse of preventing transmission. Of course they just never opened up again. Ditto water fountains.

We'll spend a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world that never meant us any harm, but paying a custodian to clean a public toilet (and providing help for those that might misuse it) is a bridge too far.

And then we'll brand anyone who dares to go to the bathroom a sex offender or other huge penalties. That is the paradox of a country that is so wealthy yet low trust. Public infrastructure is the first to go unless legally mandated( sufficient public bathrooms does not fall under this apparently).

> And then we'll brand anyone who dares to go to the bathroom a sex offender

>anyone

What? I’ve never heard of this, what part of the world do you live in?

> We'll spend a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world that never meant us any harm

While I'm sure the US has bombed a significant number of such people, I wouldn't call Iran as 'never meant us any harm' (though I'll still say the current war is a stupid mistake).

Brother Iran isn't the US's first rodeo in the middle east

https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar

The actual number is 8 trillion

The clerics and politicians in Iran use the US as a great big boogeyman to drum up political support, but until recently most of the regular people just didn't care about the regular people in the US. Same with the people in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or ... If they do have an opinion about the US, its probably that they mostly wish we'd stop bombing their homes and just leave them alone.

But, it makes the defense industry a whole lot a money, and its good for getting Republicans elected. But helping US citizens, some of which might have gasp brown skin, that doesn't make any defense contractors any money at all! /s

I don't know..

I tend to think that killing democratically elected leader of a country because they wanted to nationalize their oil, installing a dictator, then spending years trying to destroy the country could possibly upset people.

You clearly don't know much about Iran or Iranians if you think they are all raving lunatics bent on destroying the world for fun.

More correct; we’ll spend a trillion dollars giving free things to people too lazy, addicted or mentally unwell to support themselves, but paying for mental hospitals and police is a bridge too far.

> that never meant us any harm

This is absurdly false.

I think the war with Iran is not justified. It is a waste of money, a waste of human life, and a waste of our world influence. But there are many in Iran who literally wish death to the USA. The founding manifesto of Hezbollah - an organization so tightly coupled to Iran that they view the Supreme Leader of Iran as their ultimate clerical authority - lists its first objective as resistance against the US.

San Francisco has few (French JC Decaux) public toilets (pit stop, etc.), but some are inside other public properties that are not open 24/7 (e.g. rec centers). https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Map-of-Public-Bat...

Similarly, free public bath/shower disappeared in SF. Some wealthy person (forgot his name) built some free public showers in the 1900, but they eventually got all closed. Paris still have about ~20 free public bath/shower running. Wondering if we should also bring those back. This is a basic human need (after restrooms and food).

Yeah. Once in SF I was rejected by 5 businesses in a row to use their restrooms. The nearest public park had its restroom locked. I, a non-homeless person, was forced by nature to pee behind a building in a parking lot.

I had no choice. The businesses had a choice. The parks manager had a choice.

And now I understand why SF stinks.

SF is still the only place I worked where I walked out to my car parked on the street and a homeless person was openly peeing on my tire as people walked by.

I am going to start calling the reduction or removal of minor things that helped society "micro regressions".

Is tragedy of the commons overused?

Enpissification?

Micro-regressions will largely be in the realm of charity and hospitality as society has aggressively embodied capitalism's cost and benefit analysis.

Don't forget privacy

Feels like tons of micro regressions around our expectations of privacy these days

I’m not sure it’s a regression really

If you look at a graph of the world population it’s seems clear to me that freely available common resources are just going to continue to get overused and ruined as we continue to add people to the equation

Surely bathrooms are something we can produce faster than the rate at which population increases.

people can destroy things faster than you can build or even maintain them is the problem.

it's mean to identify the certain people or hold them accountable, though, so we don't.

Your argument is unrelated to the global population.

but wouldn't that also follow... more people can create and maintain more common resources?

tbh I think this falls into a more familiar pattern with a coincidentally fitting name: enshittification

no one makes money off of public toilets, so they don't exist anymore

It probably isn't as much about population growth as the increasing wealth gap. My hypothesis would be that a society where people don't feel fair distribution of wealth is more prone to this 'abuse' that you call 'overuse'.

I think it's mostly drug addicts.

Drug addicts don't become addicts all of the sudden. Lots of people with no place to go resort to awful things, people that feel like they have no place in society do not see a reason to take care of it. It doesn't make it right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address the root cause.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y31WAq4cENo

Strange "For the Classroom" question.

Men seeking same-sex encounters transformed the pissoir into something its planners never intended. Who ultimately determines the meaning of a public space: its designers, authorities, or the people who use it?

The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity.

I'm not sure what constructive classroom discussion you can have when the example is based on the law being broken.

That didn't stop... a lot of people.

They're probably talking about the sociological functions of the facility, not the set of legally permissible uses of it. (There's a pretty famous book on this particular application, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex In Public Places.)

Surely there are all kinds of interesting and constructive classroom discussions to be had about lawbreaking.

Classrooms teach about reality (among other things) and there are many things in reality that don't involve obedience to the law, as it exists at a particular time and place.

It sounds like, of the three options given, you are squarely in the “authorities” camp (although it seems to me that you interpret the question as asking what you believe should happen, whereas it appears to be asking what happens in practice). Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear the other points of view?

> The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity.

Follow-up question: Does an enclosed stall count as "public space"?

If I'm about to step into it 5 seconds after you leave, yes it does.

And yet when I want to do some photography, as is my right in public spaces, everyone gets all indignant.

the pissoir . . . the greatest concession most of them made to privacy was a little iron screen separating the user from the street.

Look at the photos in the article, they weren't enclosed stalls. Its elegant in a way, just a couple feet of opaque material that wraps the beltline of a central aiming point. Basically as good as going on a tree but without people getting uptight.

>The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity.

When it's one person, true, but when it's a population, the politics historically changes and the law accedes to pressure to stop enforcing that determination.

Playing the devil's advocate: The law also determined that any space, public or private, can't be used for same-sex sexual activity. So that was a driving force for people seeking completely anonymous encounters, in spaces that aren't linked to either person.

You have not understood the question. It is not asking who determines the use/intent of a space, it is asking who determines the meaning of the space. The law determines that it is not to be used for sexual activities. But what is the true meaning of the space? Is the true meaning the law, and only the law?

Interesting. And quite sad - we definitely should invest in things that make people lives better all around.

There are countries were public bathrooms are everywhere - New Zealand is a good example. As a tourist, you're never too far from one. Which is good, since quite often that may be the only human made thing, surrounded by beautiful nature.

I visited Hollywood Boulevard once. That was nuts. No public toilets anywhere, in one of the most famous tourist attractions in the country. Worse, food establishments won't let you use the restroom, claiming they have none or that it was out of order.

Thankfully I found one in a cinema.

Oh, there's definitely a well-used star-shaped public toilet off the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

Not just in remote locations. We just got a new public toilet in my suburb's town center. But the lack of public facilities is certainly noticeable when traveling.

Fun that this article concentrates on gay sex restrictions and pressure by temperance advocates - two "enemies" that conveniently serve a certain social agenda - while public toilets, at least in Europe, died because of heroin users in the 70s and 80s (they used bathrooms to inject, often leaving their syringes behind, and that became a real problem and society-wide panic during the AIDS boom) and because of the increasing number of homeless people later - who used to clean themselves in public toilets with a sink and more often than not left them in terrible conditions.

drug users ruin everything. it's why we cant have nice things anymore

For everyone blaming homeless people, I had a highly educated white professor who explained how he became homeless for a bit.

Divorce.

The wife can just say she doesn’t feel comfortable with you in the house.

Now you can’t find another place to live because the divorce has ruined your credit while still stuck paying the mortgage.

Most of us are much closer to living in a porta potty than we’d like to think

We're all just one or two paychecks away from smoking fentanyl, screaming at random people, and masturbating on public transit.

> Most of us are much closer to living in a porta potty than we’d like to think

Because of women and no-fault divorce? Didn't expect to see that conclusion in the comments. Maybe if we make it illegal it might slightly lower rates of homelessness, but let's see what it does to domestic violence, suicide, and spousal homicide statistics.

Alright.

Be single.

Get sick.

Get fired.

Medical bills will ruin you instead. America has an accelerated path to homelessness most civilized countries lack.

One advanced civilization has tens of thousand of free public toilets.

https://lazyholidayplanner.com/essential-tools/japan-toilet-...

https://www.cnn.com/travel/gallery/japanese-public-toilet-ph...

https://www.toilet-map-jp.com/en

https://toiletrix.org/toilets/japan

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_toilets_i...

Plus, virtually every convenience store in Japan has a clean and ready-to-use bathroom. And there is a very high density of convenience stores. Bathrooms everywhere!

They're all in Tokyo ;)

My all-time-favorite film is Perfect Days depicting days in the life of a sanitation worker overseeing toilets around Tokyo. A must-watch film!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days

> They're all in Tokyo ;)

Yeah and effectively any store outside urban America.

I also was thinking of this film, however I found it really dull.

What did you like about it?

I'm not trying to diss you, I usually like contemplative movies but this one was just too repetitive for my taste.

I resonated with what seemed to be a portrayal of appreciation of daily life and work (even if it isn't glamorous or cushiony).

The daily pause the main character makes as he leaves for work -- looking up at the sky, to be present and notice.

I loved the concept depicted in several scenes of the main character interacting with someone unknown through a tic-tac-toe game: finding a whimsical connection rather than throwing out the piece of paper.

The depiction of tender relationships between people.

It's a quiet film, comparatively, almost nothing happens. I found it very beautiful.

I was thrilled to learn the word komorebi - sunlight leaking through trees.

Downstream of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...

Fascinating stuff. And what a logo.

> Starting a national crusade to cast away coin-operated commodes, Gessel told newsmen, "You can have a fifty-dollar bill, but if you don't have a dime, that metal box is between you and relief."

I'm sympathetic to this argument. Carrying around loose change with US-style billfold wallets has never been convenient, and back in the day you'd often find yourself without change for a bus fare or a pay phone and so on in a critical moment.

Today, though, almost everyone carries either a contactless credit card or a phone with an NFC wallet. I would pay $0.25 for access to a clean public toilet if I could swipe one of those instead of having to carry change.

LA Metro has these restroom facilities at their rail stations, which are free for a 10 minute visit but require an access code on your phone or a standalone entry pass. I've never used one, but heard great things. https://thronelabs.co/

> Today, though, almost everyone carries either a contactless credit card or a phone with an NFC wallet. I would pay $0.25 for access to a clean public toilet if I could swipe one of those instead of having to carry change.

This is one of those things that gets ruined by credit card transaction fees though, right?

It is kinda depressing that after all these fintech companies and society's ~decade long scam-filled obsession with cryptocurrency, we still don't really have a good solution for microtransactions. Credit card companies still take that fixed fee everywhere, right?

It gets ruined by the government choosing to not operate an electronic money transfer system as infrastructure similar to cash.

>operate an electronic money transfer system as infrastructure similar to cash.

if the government were smart they'd pass a law to do this, makes it much easier to get rid of cash

Not ruined, just diminished. If too much of the $0.25 is taken by fees, then make it $0.50, or $1, or whatever. In many places, there'd be plenty of business still.

Nowadays it'd be $5.25 per use, plus tip (22% or more).

Another example of completely counterproductive interference in the free market, this time eliminating public toilets more or less entirely because you can't make money from them and the state is too incompetent to provide them.

> While CEPTIA's campaign was successful in largely eliminating pay toilets in the United States, critics charge that the result was not a flourishing of free public toilets, but rather fewer public toilets of any sort than in other countries that did not see a movement against pay toilets.

Road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I live in a part of the US where ample free relatively clean restrooms are available and actually quite large. I can drive hundreds of miles in any direction and generally a restroom can be found with minimal advanced planning. All to say, traveling out of my comfort zone I know how restrictive and difficult finding a toilet can be and it actually gives me a bit of anxiety when going on any trip. Even other parts of the US can be significantly less convenient.

Useful app to have installed for those couple times a year you need one and cannot remember what was the name of that thing you saw 6 months ago...

LavSeeker - shows toilets listed in OpenStreetMap.

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.woheller69.lavatories/

Don't know where they went, but here they are :

https://cartes.app/?cat=toilettes&perspective=non#14.58/48.8...

I feel like HN should ban discussion of homelessness, due to the extreme ignorance and prejudice of the comments.

A bunch of people who don't know the first thing about it jumping to conclusions. The quality of the comments here is so so poor.

And there's an argument that the ignorance and poor comment quality is exactly why they should be kept, highlighted, and passed about.

But what does one learn, if one is ignorant and is only reading ignorant comments?

The reason red-backs have the publicly visible red stripe is so others can identify them for what they are.

You're advocating for making red-backs less visible?

Consider Meta-borg, it's their own comment history that may damn them in the multiplying deliberate child manipulation trials as common people clearly see how they think.

I don't get the references, sorry, but I do see your underlying point.

I just wish the people who value critical thinking so highly when we are talking about the js ecosystem or llms, didn't turn into Victorians when we talk about poverty

Apologies, busy times IRL.

Red backs are an Australian spider that has a painful, potentially fatal, bite - you want to know what they are when dealing with them (often just moving them away from people you love, sometimes straight up the vacuum tube).

Meta - formerly Facebook, is facing an increasing number of trials across the US and other countries related to their internally discussed in emails handling of children. attracting them, hooking them, and grooming them to be adult units of income, etc - regardless of detrimental effects.

How are the comments ignorant and what should we learn?

Even if a lot of discussion is ignorant, we can still observe that it works infinitely better for 95% of society in other countries where they handle it differently.

This reminds me of an idea. Of a mat, with conclusion on it, that you can jump into...

It reminds me of what happened to public bathrooms.

Nah problem doesn't go away if you hide it, it just festers in echo chambers and then bites back when you least expect it, with unexpected ferocity (cue last elections).

This is open forum, let people voice their ideas even if you strongly oppose them. At least then folks don't live in illusion how rest of society has similar opinions on it as they do. I strongly oppose apple or meta for example, but asking for bans on this topic here would be ridiculous and put me into crank territory, right.

You don't like the discussion? Close that tab and move on into something more productive is the best advice I can give you

> You don't like the discussion?

Its nothing to do with not liking the discussion. People who have no idea about the research done in to homelessness, have not spoken to hundreds of homeless people or worked in support services to actually genuinely know about the situation are just causing more issues and hindering progress. Rough sleeping has been a thing as long as humans have been on the earth, and uninformed people just seem to think its a money issue or there is some other simple solution that lazy governments aren't doing. If the solution was a simple one of money in the right place it would have been solved years ago. The situation is infinitely more complex than that. Every persons story, reasons, and attitude to help are completely different.

Feel free to have your open forum discussion, but as proven thousands of times before this uninformed discussion does nothing other than to cause arguments through unnecessary tension and hostility. This is a problem for very experienced people to work on, not for common people with no real life experience to throw comments on a public forum about.

What recourse do those of us who want to live in a clean productive society have while we wait for the world's sociologists to finally figure out a solution to the homelessness problem? I don't think I'm alone in wanting to see panhandlers, drug addled zombies, and schizophrenics out of all public spaces.

Perhaps some sympathy and care towards your fellow man would help?

Your attitude towards them being a nuisance is what needs to change. For example you could easily go out today and invite a rough sleeper to come back and stay at your place for a few nights. That would get one of them off the streets immediately.

Ok, that has to be a joke.

One thing that I continue to wonder about is why is sympathy always directed at the person who is visibly in rough sorts - these people are definitely suffering from mental illness and substance addictions, but there are rarely calls for sympathy directed towards those who have to suffer annoyance, harassment, and sometimes abuse at the hands of these individuals. Not to mention the mental toll it takes on people seeing their communities and favorite haunts slowly degrade over time.

People don't want to live in depressing conditions, so I think some sympathy should be directed at them who have near zero ability to improve their surroundings while academics and NGOs wring their hands about the "homelessness problem" without actually making these communities better in any meaningful sense.

You think this topic should be banned because you don't agree with the people discussing it? I actually think there's a good argument here that the topic is politics, which is off-topic and doesn't belong on HN. But wanting it banned because you disagree is just childish... You also added nothing of your own to the discussion, simply stating that everyone else is ignorant and prejudiced.

I don’t think it’s productive to complain about the ignorance of the community without attempting to engage in educating it.

I want to know where the public water fountains went. Those are arguably a safety feature.

At least in my area, a lot of folks didn't trust the tap water, and more didn't trust the fountain to not be super germy, so fountains just didn't end up used. I noticed many shuttered during COVID then they never got turned back on, then eventually got removed.

I have seen indoor fountains gradually being replaced with water bottle filler stations, but I personally wonder how often those filters get replaced.

In Portland, OR there are 100 or so public fountains known as Benson Bubblers. If you drink from one there is a small chance it is one of the bubblers I machined back in the day. Unfortunately, there have been a number of instances of these bubblers being used as a bidet so you can imagine folks in the know are hesitant to use them. However, the Water Bureau says they are routinely cleaned.

https://www.portland.gov/water/about-portlands-water-system/...

I think it stopped once public bathrooms became used for things other than taking a whizz

Yeah you have to actually hire people to clean them and patrol for homeless weirdos. Which is why in my country they cost money.

I never really understood the economics of public restrooms in America. Who pays for them?

> Who pays for them?

Americans. The same population as most of the beneficiaries.

The public pays for them via taxes.

The problem with homeless is also what do you do with them when you find them?

Several bathrooms at the openings to hiking trails near me had been smeared with feces. The local newspaper reported someone was caught and taken to a homeless shelter. I remain suspicious that simply resulted in the shelter's bathroom meeting the same fate.

We thought it was mean to homeless people to make them pay for bathrooms and made it illegal to charge. Then once bathrooms because a massive cost center, we closed all the public restrooms and made it a sex offense to piss outside. So now instead of making homeless people pay $1 for a toilet, we throw them in jail at a cost of $100k/yr.

Thank these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i... - the road to hell is paved with good intentions I suppose.

We're not throwing the homeless in jail here, but all the streets smell like urine and you have to watch your step on the sidewalk.

A few years ago I visited downtown SF for a convention at Moscone center. I remember walking along St Patrick’s thinking this is a beautiful place but , my God, the entire area stinks of urine.

Having lived in SF, LA and NYC, I find it very hard to believe that the homeless or the addicts roaming the streets in big cities are being thrown into jail for much of anything short of overt violent behavior. You can see people drop a deuce in the middle of Mission St any day of the week and nobody bats an eye. As people say, "it's just a normal part of life in a big city".

Where are we throwing homeless people in jail for pissing outside?

Public urination is not a sex offence, it's a misdemeanor.

You don't get arrested for public urination. You get a citation, if you are drunk they might haul you to the jail for public intoxication, but you are out when you sober up.

As long as you don't pee near a school and what not you should be fine.

> I never really understood the economics of public restrooms in America. Who pays for them?

Local sales, income, and/or property taxes.

Municipalities, counties, state, and the federal government all have the power of taxation in the US.

We all pay for it. We do this whether publicly-accessible restrooms exist or do not exist.

Everybody poops; shit happens. The only real question is: Where does this shit happen?

I don't think I've seen a public bathroom in America in my lifetime. They're all privately owned, usually required through regulation.

But to answer your question, public things are paid for by the public.

Never been to a public park with a bathroom, or a state provided highway rest stop?

Many transit centers are owned and operated by a municipal transit agency and typically have restrooms, especially large airports and train stations.

Public parks and transit centers make sense. I was thinking more in urban areas, not large public land. For example, if I was in a town and needed to go to the bathroom, usually the only option is hoping a business will let you use their restroom.

We've got a ton of actually-public restrooms in my neck of the woods (in Ohio).

Public rest areas are pretty common along major highways and these include restrooms.

Publicly-owned parks usually provide a place to poop, too: Sometimes it's an installation with composting toilets, sometimes it's just a seat over a septic pit that needs pumped out periodically. Sometimes, it's fancy with flushing toilets and sinks for handwashing. Other times, it's just a rented portajohn (that may be full of spiders and smell like death, or be very tidy). And sometimes, they're locked at night when the park is closed. But -- usually -- public parks of any substance offer something for facilities.

Just last week, I worked next to a public park in a very small town (population ~2,000) with some well-maintained basketball and tennis courts. There were a couple of portajohns present. (I did not investigate them further.)

And when there's a major events that draw crowds, like our very public fireworks displays in downtown areas: Temporary restroom facilities are provided.

What we don't have very much of here are permanent, literal-public restrooms in the denser parts of cities. That is very problematic, but it is slowly improving[1].

[1]: https://downtownservices.org/news-article/three-public-restr...

> I don't think I've seen a public bathroom in America in my lifetime.

You've never been to the beach, a city park (or state or national park), a highway rest stop, or any of the thousands of other places public restrooms exist?

What a weird take...

Its not a take, it was a personal observation that ive since realized is wrong because I wasnt considering bathrooms on large public land, I was thinking about small plots of public bathrooms within large urban areas. Obviously publicly owned airports have bathrooms.

I was also not considering things like port-a-potties during public events, since i was only considering permanent structures.

the public bathroom should be redesigned so that one can do only the thing it is designed for - and maybe it needs to be a single-user design.

Almost like an airline bathroom size - might be a bit claustrophobic but these are for emergencies and space saving would be big.

the doors could be wired to sensors that are connected to a central network that shows in real-time the availability and also some alarms if something is out of the ordinary etc.

How do you accommodate ADA requirements?

perfect is the enemy of the good...

how about some of them being ADA-conforming, with maps noting where they are?

many of the comments below talk about the death of society, respect, mental illness, etc... but I mean some of this is just high use. most port-a-potties are a shit show (literally). go to a festival, it's people waiting in line and having doing the drunk peepee dance and trying not to explode when they get in there. I can name a few port-a-potties that were nice, there's one in the park by my suburban house. it gets like no use (looking at the chart), it's pretty clean. but also a ton of these things are getting a cleaning every 2 weeks min.

like do you want to pick up that piece of toilet paper you dropped on the ground in that thing with nothing to clean your hands other than sanitizer?

funny enough, I find many public campground vault toilets to be pretty clean, because the camp hosts clean them daily. theworste one I've ever seen is the first bathroom into yosemite from sf. it's not because the homeless are coming from SF to shit there. It's because a) that's the first place you can panic dump, b) there's a line, c) that's where the tourists go. it's also the most graffitied one by far.

if you don't give people a way to clean up easily... then you're dependent on the official service interval. shits gonna happen.

Friends were just in Australia and were immensely impressed by not only the ubiquitous public bathrooms, but also how well maintained and clean they are.

Tons of free to use BBQs too.

Here in the SoCal area the homeless were taking over bathrooms to live in.

Abandoning paid public bathrooms was a mistake. Better to pay a dollar and have a clean bathroom than to have 10x fewer public bathrooms but free.

This is how you do it.

Australian public toilets: https://toiletmap.gov.au/

Creative commons dataset: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/national-public-toilet-map

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1248664709

Well-meaning activists lobbied to make toilets free, but they didn't build a base to support the continued use and maintenance of those now-free toilets.

A pissoir is of little comfort when you badly need a shittoir.

They take them away when there’s too many drug addicts wandering around being a nuissance.

No public washrooms -> societal decay.

> Notably, they were only intended for use by men.

this complicates public bathrooms quite a bit, and ADA requirements do too... once you've got a place to sit and doors on rooms you've got the vagrancy and drug use problem

though China does ok with the model of a big room with holes in the ground and almost no dividers or affordances at all (everyone brings their own toilet paper, old people bring their own chairs)... they have public workers to hose them out

Sounds like the Romans had it better than your description of the Chinese, though I am sure in the modern world someone would be stealing the sponges for unfathomable reasons.

The article claims that "Meanwhile, as Prohibition played out, the project of constructing public bathrooms slowed to a trickle, and the few that had been built began to fall into disrepair."

If that were the story, why was there a lobby in the 1970s to remove pay toilets?

  The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, or CEPTIA, was a 1970s grass-roots political organization which was one of the main forces behind the elimination of pay toilets in many American cities and states.

  According to The Wall Street Journal, there were, in 1974, at least 50,000 pay toilets in America, mostly made by the Nik-O-Lok Company. Despite this flourishing commerce, CEPTIA was successful over the next few years in obtaining bans in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, California, Florida, and Ohio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...

> But of course, there is one key clue missing from the photograph: the smell

Have been re-reading At Home by Bill Bryson [0] and just started the chapter on the bathroom. He mentions that home bathrooms often smelled b/c the "u bend" [1] hadn't yet been invented. Couldn't a public urinal be designed with a water flush function + u bend to avoid the smell?

PS Highly recommend the book if you are into the history of technology both from "what series of inventions got us to here" but also "what was life like before those inventions and how were they adopted"

0 - https://amzn.to/4xlWN1m

1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l40fso/e...

I used one these things in Portugal a few years ago.

They are definitely not thought for women.

But I have to say that if you have a very cheap solution for 25% of your use cases you should definitely use it.

What you can't do is neglect the other 75%.

I had to stop and think, but I follow your mathematical reasoning. Although 1:1 is not a realistic number; i'd think more like 4:1 or more? and if men over 60 are around, it's going higher for sure.

When I visited Europe it was even worse. Everywhere was a pay toilet, and most of the time, they were very far apart, or weren't around at all. In some walkways and tunnels where the toilets closed for the evening, there was excrement right outside the door.

It's such a disrespect to basic humanity.

So what's the answer? Where did they all go and why?

Was the takeaway supposed to be "public bathroom" meant either public urinal (ruined by stigma for gay sex and blackmail) or saloon (ruined by temperance)?

We're missing like 100 years of the story chronicling psychiatric over-optimism, deinstitutionalization, gentrification of barely livable housing, rent-seeking, and all the rest of the factors.

I think it's a maintenance story. It's unglamorous, invisible maintenance. There's no such thing as a perpetually clean bathroom because it is exclusively used by tidy people-- messes happen everywhere but they are ignored more in some places and that compounds and invites abuse.

seeing the commons get worse in your lifetime, span of 10-15 years, if we're really precise about it, really is quite a trip.

One of the first lessons I learned as a homeless person is that restroom access is one of the most vital things for survival and staying out of jail.

I am not sure of the real-world risk, but to hear Internet commenters, if you are a man and you urinate in public, you may be on a fast path to being a registered sex-offender for no other reason. That is an obviously sad consequence that no homeless guy wants to be burdened with.

The first time I needed to go and I was out on the streets, I veered into the nearest resort hotel downtown, figuring I'd just be lost in the crowd of tourists there. It was night but not particularly late. As soon as I got inside the men's room and in front of a urinal, a security guard was on my case. He said restrooms were for hotel guests only. I was very apologetic, but at least he let me finish and let me get away peacefully.

For all y'all complaining how the public libraries and other facilities are infested with smelly homeless, those are the ones who try to live honestly and stay near sanitation facilities. The libraries saved my bacon when I was on the streets. They were a quiet refuge during the day. I didn't make trouble; I just needed to stay in the A/C and stay clean and have a bathroom nearby.

People complain about poo in the streets of major cities, but the reality is, if a person cannot afford a restaurant, a coffeehouse, a motel, or whatever else, they will not have access to restroom facilities, and we all poop sometime. So the lack of those public restroom facilities in urban centers is just one more inhumane, hostile environment that tells us to pay up or GTFO of polite society.

IMO each city should have space dedicated for homeless camping with 24h running water and easy to clean stainless steel bathroom facilities. Do any cities do this, especially cities where weather is mild? Would homeless actually use it in favor of streets if available?

Also why didn't you use shelter facilities, were they too crowded, unsafe, or had onerous rules?

> Also why didn't you use shelter facilities, were they too crowded, unsafe, or had onerous rules?

Yes, thank you for asking!

Before arriving in the Phoenix area, I had been homeless in San Diego. Most of that time I lived in Father Joe's Villages. That was a very well-run, clean and strict shelter. They had wraparound services, with a cafeteria, job-search space, etc. They did turn us out on the streets during the daylight hours. I must say that I almost enjoyed my stay there, and in fact I made friends, and I felt very safe under their roof.

Contrast with Tempe, Arizona: Tempe, in 2000, did not allow any homeless shelters within the city limits. They also prohibited "soup kitchens" or any church or facility from feeding hungry people. However, Tempe has a larger population of drifters and street people, due to the college-town, party atmosphere, especially downtown.

In contrast, Phoenix has a very large St. Vincent de Paul facility, which doles out supplies and serves meals, and which is several miles south of downtown, in an industrial zone. The main homeless shelter campus provides a SVdP cafeteria, job services, and all that, but when I arrived there in 2000, it was very scary, bad neighborhood, very bad experience, and I basically could not stay there in good conscience. I did not feel safe inside, nor walking around the environs.

Therefore I split the difference, and stayed on the streets of Tempe. It was libraries during the day, and 24-hour diners at night, as much as possible. I napped on benches that were not in parks. (The city park facilities closed at midnight at the latest; they had Park Rangers serious about sweeping them out; the sprinklers would drench you if you were anywhere near the grass parts!)

Being that I was in "The System" and confidently on a waiting list for housing, it was not difficult to slip through the shadows for a couple of years until that housing promise became reality.

city where I live does have that. And there are also homeless shelters that you're allowed to use for three months of the year. And the homeless spend every November/December trying to figure out when are you going to check into that homeless shelter for your three months so you can be off the streets when it is deathly cold outside.

Most of the homeless have significant issues and are not going to get off the street. In better cases a messy divorce is at fault and they could hold a job but they refuse because it would not help their life.

There's also one rich person in my city who chooses to live in a tent year round. When you have a ton of money, being homeless is actually freedom because you can afford a nice warm sleeping bag and a nice tent. It makes a huge difference. This is one person out of, I don't know how many, but hundreds at least. Mostly I bring this man up because it messes up everyone's expectation of how you should deal with the homeless.

Such a fascinating vector of thought. Where are these homeless campings in Japan?

This is true, and an understated consequence of homelessness. My city is working on deploying portapotties for the homeless for this reason.

> "If you’ve ever been wandering the streets of Chicago or New York, wondering why there’s no place to pee..."

Oh, there are places to pee, if you're brave. My last venture into a NYC public restroom was the one at Sun Yat-sen Plaza, which is under a beautiful pavilion. There was a man hanging around the urinals without apparent purpose other than staring at me because of course there was. There was only 1 working stall of 3, over the entire surface of which someone had managed to squirt at least a quart of liquid poo.

That's a nice park. Most dudes I assume piss on the sidewalk.

It's a roulette which can lead to a ticket, or an entry in the sex-offender registry, or nothing. Where it stops, nobody knows. Best just buy something at a bar, restaurant, café to get bathroom privileges.

America banned pay bathrooms, and now we have no public bathrooms

In Bern, Switzerland there are still a few of those "historic" Pissoir in public. (Well at least 2 that come to my mind, one actually really old) - the second near a club is also used by girls, I never watched how but they do.

As a tourist I imagine its hard to find a toilet if you need one right now. If you lived here for a while you know where to go, and that it's either shared with junkies or costs CHF 2. Or in rare occasions nether of both

"Almost immediately, they became the favored meeting spot for men seeking rendezvous with one another. They were relatively private, secluded, and perfect for communicating anonymously with graffiti—the ideal release valve for a population that was prohibited from meeting publicly."

What are they eluding to?

Homosexuality was legalized in France in 1791, so what other trysts are these that involve men?

Yes, where are you going to take a bath, in public.

It's interesting that this subject is awash with euphemisms. At least pissoir is properly descriptive.

Something else I've noticed, garbage cans are disappearing.

I had some trash in my car I needed to get rid of: McDonalds? None outside, Tacobell? none outside, CVS? none outside OR inside, The entire rest of that shopping center? nope.

Luckily gas stations still have them but its sad to see these community service type things disappear.

You would think it's in the interest of whoever is responsible for keeping those areas clean to offer garbage cans.

I live by a park. These places don't care for the same reason the park doesn't care: the wind blows it all in my yard, not their problem anymore.

It would be, if the responsible parties were making rational decisions.

It is unlikely the low-ranked employees responsible for cleaning up garbage are making decisions on whether to construct or retain garbage cans.

Agreed. It was never my intent to suggest that they would be doing so.

So move up the management ladder, if you will, until a party that is responsible for making this kind of decision is reached. That's the class of party of which I was speaking, and where I suggested that irrational decisions are being made.

Someone -- at some point -- did make a decision to eliminate outdoor trash cans at these establishments. They used to be present and no longer are, and they didn't disappear on their own.

I'm not sure that anyone in the management ladder is affected. People don't generally choose a fast food restaurant or convenience store based on the cleanliness of their parking lots, so sales isn't going to be affected. Nor is staff, already cut to minimal levels, going to be given additional hours to keep the parking lots clean.

There even might be a disincentive to have garbage cans if they can't be maintained. People who don't litter will either take the extra step of going indoors, or they might leave it in their own car to throw out later. Whereas people who do litter will do so regardless of when there are trash cans. By removing outdoor trash cans, you've "saved" the staff the time to monitor and clear out those trash cans.

If that's really your take on this then I have no option but to accept it.

Let's move forward.

What incentivized them to provide the trash cans to begin with, might you suppose? They aren't cheap to buy, or to maintain, or to keep emptied daily (or as they fill up, or whatever). But yet: They were things that existed, and their existence was definitely deliberate.

What motivates companies that still provide outdoor trash cans to continue to do so?

It's probably part of the initial franchise standards, required and signed off by the fast food corporation. Or the shopping center design. We know as a society, that we need garbage cans, so they are budgeted for and installed.

But owners are always looking for ways to save money. If the garbage can works fine, it gets maintained. But if it gets hit by a car, or the wind blows it away, it might not be at the top of the list of things to fix. The remnants of the garbage can are removed. The expense gets put off for another month. And slowly the lack of garbage cans becomes normal, and staff can remove another responsibility from their list.

Now the situation becomes, who wants to spend a bunch of money to put in garbage cans, and also add onto the staff's workload? It's not like customers are asking for the manager to install garbage cans.

Every single time we interact, it becomes increasingly clear that you aren't picking up my words at all.

I feel like I'm chatting with ChatGPT 3, as I was years ago when it would just articulately weasel its way around everything I asked with a profundity of deflective nonsense in response to any query.

Or at least: That's what it did when it wasn't confidently introducing hallucinations as rote facts.

> It's probably part of the initial franchise standards, required and signed off by the fast food corporation.

Why were they required? What motivated this requirement?

Someone, somewhere, at some point: They decided that there shall be trash cans. This is a thing that happened. What compelled them to make this decision, might you suppose?

(If you don't have an answer, then that's fine by me. It's a rhetorical question at this point. I've already internally rejected your reasoning for the trash cans becoming gone while outwardly accepting that your opinion is simply inflexibly the way that it is. It is unlikely that I can be further swayed by a lack of an opinion for why the trash cans originated to begin with.)

I thought that was obvious. Stores specify garbage cans outside for the convenience of their customers. People generate trash, especially while eating. But also when they buy stuff. So we have garbage cans so they don't have to carry it with them, and the trash is contained. But they're not entirely necessary, just like public bathrooms.

We seem to be just talking past each other, so maybe we should just agree to stop wasting each other's time.

People do chose fast food by the neighborhood. When I was at McDonald's - 30 years ago so this may have changed - corporate policy was you would clean your parking lot and everyone for one block. We were encouraged to paint any abandoned building in the one block range at our expense just to ensure the area looked nice.

> So move up the management ladder, if you will, until a party that is responsible for making this kind of decision is reached. That's the class of party of which I was speaking, and where I suggested that irrational decisions are being made.

No matter what, big or small, it's always a Republican's fault, huh.

This reminds me of a story I heard (read?) a long time ago. At Disney World they had a rule about a garbage can being within a 10 foot distance of basically anywhere in the park. The logic was that when a garbage can is nearby, there is additional social pressure not to litter, and the result was that they were able to save money on park cleanup because people used the cans.

When I see lone overflowing garbage cans in big cities I think about this.

I haul my garbage home in my backpack like a good little global citizen but the lack of trash cans in San Francisco is crazy

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Trash-c...

I feel like there are plenty personally. I usually don't have to walk more than a block or two to find one.

That article is from 20 years ago by the way

> I usually don't have to walk more than a block or two to find one.

That is not the situation in most of the city, whether it be "nice" parts or "nasty" parts. Restaurant districts tend to have more trash cans than anywhere else, but the presence of a restaurant district is no guarantee of good trash can coverage. Source: I've walked around so much of San Francisco in my ~fifteen years here.

In the places I frequent that have reasonable trash can coverage, I've found that trash cans are very slowly disappearing and never coming back. Maybe they get fucked up beyond usefulness and don't get replaced? I really have no idea.

Blame the raccoons!

In city centers it's usually counter-terrorism: it's easy to throw a timed bomb in a metal garbage can and flee the scene, so they got rid of them (London did because of IRA, and of course now they have Islamic terrorism). Outside of city centers it's about (lack of) recycling: it's easier to check if you're recycling correctly in your home bin than public bins.

Why would you throw a bomb into a garbage can? Who loiters next to one?

100% just drop it behind you as you exit the tram. Way better metal container for blasting.

"Counter-terrorism" just means nobody thought about it more than 2 seconds or else they'd have a more specific reason.

It was pretty common with the IRA, apparently. They hid bombs in metal garbage cans and used the shrapnel as a damage multiplier. I think they did that at a commercial center and killed several people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23695239

> More than 2,000 bins were cleared from the Square Mile after a truck bomb killed one person and injured 44

While I'm not intimate with the difference between British English and American English, I'm pretty confident "Truck Bomb" does not mean a bomb inside a rubbish bin.

But yes, vehicles are a great vector for terrorism and I'm honestly surprised at how few instances there are of people just running other over. But it's also one of the reasons in the US basically every government building has large concrete planters around them (can't ram a truck through it).

Explosion resistant trash receptacles do exist but they’re pricey so it makes sense London didn’t replace theirs. The most common place to see them is in airports.

Easiest way of doing it is to just hang a clear plastic trash bag from a simple metal hoop - that's what is commonly done at stations in London.

Weirdly, bins were never removed from train stations in Northern Ireland. Bin bombs were never really a thing there, it was generally easier to shut down the railway by setting something on fire at a level crossing (often a hijacked police landrover)...

> I had some trash in my car I needed to get rid of

Bring it home and use your own trash can? I don’t really understand why you need to immediately get rid of it.

One of the primary goals of the pandemic and lockdowns was to eliminate cost centers for every business.

If you notice how courtesy services disappeared, and many facilities were closed, because of a lack of staff or funds to clean them and maintain them.

It has actually been difficult to get into a restroom at certain restaurants, even now; sometimes I will find a handwritten sign there like “Employees Only” which is against health codes.

I rode a scooter to a “Drive-In” burger restaurant last month. Not a drive-thru, mind you, but a place where folks pulled up in cars and carhops served them, and they ate while parked. And this place had picnic tables, so I ordered a burger combo and tried to wash my hands.

There was no restroom available, and I contacted the order-taker guy and asked to confirm, and then I asked to cancel my order. He said “Your order is ready!” and I said hell naw, if you don’t have a restroom then you’re not serving anyone, so I got my refund...

Options: (a) SF should offer a tax incentive for any business that opens up their bathrooms to the public (b)Contract out installation of clean, well-designed porta-potties with regular cleaning (c) What else?

It's ridiculous that a "world class" city has very few public bathrooms.

The article does not even begin to answer the question of the title.

Odd. I’ve been noticing lately that there are far more public bathrooms in southern Ontario than when I was a kid. A lot of parks have them now and if not, at least have portable ones.

They were lost due to the tender ministrations of the bottom quintile.

You're blaming ... the poor?

No, the antisocial.

Almost every convenience store in Japan has a public toilet. Yes, it is polite to purchase something but it's not required. Some even have bidet function.

Not for long.

This is quite a problem in London. I've been there recently and you really cannot go to toilet if not in a hotel office or a museum

My hometown of Wichita, Kansas recently installed two fully plumbed public restrooms in our downtown core and it was, predictably, met with incensed rage online at the cost of durable vandal-proof public utilities and tearing up concrete to run sewer and water lines to them, and used as an example of "government waste on stupid bathrooms", similar to a project starting next week that cuts down one of our asinine five-lane highway-sized surface streets to a more reasonable 3 lanes as a traffic calming measure, to a similarly predictable chorus of politically charged pejoratives and entitlement.

It's such a shame that somewhat objective, proven improvements to the general quality of life in an urban area are so quickly dismissed by selfish entitled idiots and used as political leverage by politicians because it's "Big Government".

Much of the US banned paid public bathrooms. The people behind the initiative dreamed of getting a cornucopia of free public bathrooms.

Same place free trash pickup went, gov do not want the expense of public bathrooms.

Here in the US, where I am all public restrooms were gone by the late 80s.

I never understood this:

1.) restrooms for paying customers only

2.) defecating/urinating in public illegal

How can both be true at the same time?

I really hate how adversarial our society has become.

Call it an informal institution to push homeless away but without worry about way to define them, like you'd deny on a sign - a word for homeless doesn't do it, it's not a single flag that marks someone as an undesirable.

[1] is apparently how society converges on an assumption you're engaged in business as a customer, employee, or entrepreneur, then everything is accessible to you.

[2] is the check to make sure people excluded in [1] are punished for using the commons instead of a sanitary location.

In American cities, as long as you don’t look like a bum, hotel lobbies are usually accessible.

Sperry Rand building, 14th floor, Morgan Apparel. Mention my name- they'll give you the key.

Lots of comments here blaming the bad state of toilets on homeless people doing drugs.

They're not the only issue.

In France, toilets on highways are often disgusting. French highways have stupid-high tolls, so these toilets are used by people who have access to a car, and can spare a few tens of € to get to their destination faster. Not your typical drug-using homeless person. I'd say it's more that some people don't care to clean after themselves, and once the toilet is dirty, no one will touch it if they add up to the mess.

> In France, toilets on highways are often disgusting

For real. I once saw one totally covered in blood, like a horrible murder scene. It was one of the more rural ones, at a rest stop / park. And I just kind of rolled my eyes as I wasn't even surprised

Ironic to see an article lamenting the loss of public utilities from JSTOR.

there's a market for a gig-economy app where someone brings a toilet to you.

Alan Jones ruined them for everyone.

When there's no public bathrooms, everything is a "public bathroom'.

Just 2 weeks ago, saw people pissing/shitting at a pull-over in Iceland. Laws explicitly forbid that... But when you gotta go, you go.

And Iceland also hits people with NO public restrooms at all, and pay restrooms to boot. I saw upwards of $1.50 for bathroom usage.

And in the USA, bathrooms are free, but almost always exclusively corporate funded, and usually "customers only". And in my local city, there's a few real city public restrooms. They naturally lock themselves after 11pm. Yeah, it's anti-homeless shit.

Pro tip: find a McDonald's

These structures got old and weren't replaced. This is plain old urban decay.

Some places let their old stuff decay and get vandalized. Others tear down their old stuff and don't replace it.

But some cities - not all - tear down their ugly old stuff then - gasp - rebuild something else there. If they make that a habit, it's just expected. In such cities you look around and everything is either too beautiful to tear down, or too new to be run down.

Come to Sydney some time, it's beautiful :)

Just switch to porta-potties.

Funny how the answer is yet again more tech: bathroomaccess.com - add one when you find it.

Always remember: the cruelty is the point

The same people complaining about this are the ones who supported decriminalizing drug possession and use in public and public camping then they wonder gee why did all the local businesses go out of business and make their bathrooms private? It's because laws are no longer enforced and having a public bathroom makes you attract the worst of the worst of society--proof go check out any Starbucks or McDonalds bathroom in any major city.

"Closed due to COVID-19"

Jim Crow

The us is not a first world country.

While living in France, I finally learned how to hold my bladder for half a day like an adult

Some adults cannot. Also, consider there are lots of people with conditions that deviate slightly from the normal (some medical, some merely "not standard"). They too are legitimate users of public bathrooms.

People don't want to “abuse” commons like public restrooms, parks, buses, and so on. They do so because they have no choice, having been displaced out of having a private place to do the things they're now forced to do in public places. This is all just an outcropping of the housing crisis, which is itself an outcropping of the billionaire crisis. End billionaires, and we have the resources to de-gild this age.

I disagree. A lot of people do not care about public facilities. They do not believe in leaving things better than they found them. You've seen these people around, you know who they are. These are the same people that don't rerack weights at the gym or don't put the cart back at the supermarket. That attitude has nothing to do with income, housing, race, or activity they are interested in. It's simply a result of narcissism. The only way is stopping excuses and enforcing the public etiquette. The world will be much better off.

Sure, and thankfully there aren't nearly as many of them out and about abusing more things if they have a private place always available to spend their time. Conscientiousness is one of the handful of measurable personality traits, and there's a scale to it because some people have more of it than others. That's not going to change. What we can change is the degree to which less conscientious people are forced to lean on the conscientiousness of others around them in order to live every moment of their lives. The collapse of social safety net—pilfered in order to pay for mega yachts and renting entire cities for a wedding receiption—in the West and particularly the US pushes those less conscientious people out into the world all the time.

I've personally never paid for a yacht or someone else's wedding, I'm not sure what you're talking about...

People have no choice but to smear feces on the wall and leave needles on the floor of public restrooms, or urinate inside a moving bus because housing is too expensive?

Housing and wealth inequality is an undeniable issue. So is anti-social behaviour. You can be poor and even homeless without throwing self-respect out of the window. People are either responsible for their actions, in which case criminal and civil charges are on the cards, or they are not (due to mental illness and/or substance abuse) and need to be institutionalized.

When the social contract fails you, why pay any regard to it at all? It's not a matter of pure, exogenous choice to do those things. It's not some abstract preference that surviving in the margins has afforded the freedom to exercise. It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.

No, it's mostly severe drug addiction and mental illness.

Far and away the strongest predictor of homelessness is not mental illness or drug addiction, it's housing costs. Housing cost and the subsequent increase in homelessness is the precipitator that promotes addiction and exacerbates manageable mental health issues into mental health crises.

>It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.

Wouldn't poo-cassos be better framed in an institution cell away from the other 90% of society? That way they can get the mental support they need and rebuild their agency. If you don't have agency, you need conservators to help you address it. For children, those are parents. For adults, that's the state.

Otherwise we're admitting participation in a society is pure benefit without any responsibilities.

Because you're a decent person. Or, put another way, if you choose to disregard the social contract, you show your lack of quality of character. Either way, it's still a choice and not forced upon people by their circumstances.

“You have nothing, sure, but you still better participate in this social contract that has actually offered you no security or even basic shelter, else we give you even less nothing.” Like... why? Why would that person care? It's called the social contract, not the social religion. A contract has terms that are supposed to be fulfilled by both parties. If one party isn't holding up their end, why would the other?

If your antisocial protagonist chooses to destroy something then he or she is not "giving the finger to the man" or anything like that. He or she is making life worse for other people, most likely normal people who have not done anything whatsoever to ruin the life of your poor widdle antisocial hero. Meanwhile, the billionaires will not be affected much.

> When the social contract fails you, why pay any regard to it at all?

That may be a valid defence when stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family. Doesn't apply to trashing public bathrooms.

Apparently a lot of “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” on here defending their future legacies with downvoting.

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